Dana Foundation Blog

From the Archives: Religion and the Brain

In December 2009, Cerebrum played online host to quite a debate: Does evolution explain why the human brain supports religious belief?

Dimitrios Kapogiannis and Jordan Grafman, scientists at the National Institutes of Health, argued that brain networks that evolved for other purposes have given rise to our capacity for religious belief and experience. Andrew Newberg, the radiologist and psychiatrist who wrote How God Changes Your Brain, argued that the brain may be an instrument of religious experience but is not necessarily the origin of that experience. Each side of the debate first wrote a position statement; they then exchanged statements and wrote rejoinders.

From the Archives: Progress in Brain Injury Awareness

Soldiers returning from war with visible head injuries are easy to spot, but what about soldiers—and civilians of all ages—who have brain injuries but no external wound?

In a Cerebrum piece for us in 2008, "A Wound Obscure, Yet Serious," traumatic brain injury (TBI) specialist Wayne Gordon, Ph.D., noted that these cases of unidentified TBI were far more prevalent than people realized and offered suggestions for better awareness and treatment. He writes:

"We must develop a good way to screen for brain injury. Community agencies, health care service providers and other organizations should screen populations that are known to be at risk, such as schoolchildren, abused women, athletes, people receiving social support services, and members of the military. Similarly, within medical contexts, people who have experienced a non-brain physical trauma, such as a fall from a ladder, also should undergo screening as a precaution."

From the Archives: Neuromarketing

Marketers have tried most everything to get people to buy more, including scanning their brains. But what have they learned that way?

It's hard to know, reported writer Ann Parson in our Briefing Paper from December 2011, "Neuromarketing: Prove Thyself & Protect Consumers," because much of the research is done by private firms that don't release their data and, well, we don't know that much about how the brain works.

As researcher Annie Lang put it: “My career has been spent scientifically assessing whether we can make reliable inferences about what people are thinking and feeling while interacting with media, based on real-time measures, and it’s a pretty hard thing to do. These days, anyone can collect the data. How they interpret those data is another story, and, in many cases, we can’t assess their claims, because they’re based on in-house proprietary data.”

From the Archives: Better Plans for Drug Discovery

In July 2011, Danielle Kerkovich and Amy Drew wrote a Cerebrum essay for us on how to design a plan for discovering drugs that might work in cases of rare disease. Pharmaceutical firms can be unwilling to bet on a drug that might help only a few thousand people because it costs so much to develop a single drug and there's no guarantee a promising one will actually pan out. Meanwhile, bench scientists who do the basic research aren't equipped to translate it into a drug.

Kerkovich and Drew argued that researchers in academia and in the drug industry, with support from government and from nonprofits, should work together to promote translational research. The example they used was potential drug development for Batten disease, a rare and fatal disorder that affects young children. They write:

From the Archives: Effects of Space Travel on the Brain

During the mission on which he was the first man to walk the moon, Neil Armstrong, who passed away this weekend, spent just eight days total in space. Since then, astronauts have spent months and years in orbit. How has it affected their brains?

Armstrong and other Apollo astronauts reported occasional tiny flashes in their visual fields, even when their eyes were closed, writer Jim Schnabel recounted for us in his story this May, “Would a trip to Mars damage the brain?” NASA-funded researchers are looking for ways to protect astronauts’ brains from this and other effects for the three years it would take to voyage to Mars.