A person's religious beliefs and prejudice against immigrants can be altered through a magnetic energy zapped into the head, a new study claims. By safely shutting down the area in the brain responsible for solving abstract problems, scientists discovered that a person's perception of the world can be changed.
The scientists applied a process known as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to the brain's posterior medial frontal cortex, a region near the forehead.
In a study issued in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, scientists from the University of York and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) applied the TMS to respondents and then asked them to write a brief essay regarding their inevitable death. Then, they read two essays recently written by immigrants. The first essay held positive ideas about the United States while the second essay was critical.
They were also asked about the different facets of their beliefs in religion, which included their belief in the existence of an afterlife, angels, the devil and God. All the respondents were pre-assessed to guarantee that they had firm religious beliefs before starting the study.
After TMS was applied, scientists found that respondents became almost 25.8 percent less negative towards immigrants and 32.8 percent less firm with their religious beliefs.
Dr. Keise Izuma, a psychologist who cooperated with the study, said that when the pre-frontal cortex was shut down, people weren't able to remember any comforting thought of the afterlife related to their religion despite being exposed to the idea of their own death. They also found that hearing criticism about a nation is usually processed by respondents as a threat ideologically.
"The immigrant who's very critical, they're calling into question group values, to some extent they're challenging the group and they may be undermining deep-seated conviction on the part of the participant," Colin Holbrook, one of the researchers, said.
Holbrook also said that most of the respondents reported that their answers were not influenced by their emotional state. However, one of the study's limitations is that researchers were only able to survey a limited number of people with a total of 38 respondents.
"These findings are very striking, and consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are re-purposed to also produce ideological reactions," Holbrook added.
Meanwhile, scientists believe that studies regarding the psychological factors of ideological belief will be beneficial in understanding history.
Photo : Sue Clark | Flickr
