This will also have the same effect.
Posted on 11/15/2008 6:54:10 AM PST by Alex Murphy
London, Nov 15 (ANI): Religious people really do see the world differently, that's what a new research ahs suggested.
The study found that Dutch Calvinists notice embedded visual patterns quicker than their atheist compatriots.
According to Bernhard Hommel, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the new study, culture has long been known to distort visual perception.
In a bid to see if religious differences skew perception, Hommel's team tested 40 Dutch atheist and Calvinist university students, who, religion aside, had similar cultural backgrounds.
In the study, Hommel's team showed participants a large triangle or square made of either smaller triangles or squares on a computer screen.
The volunteers had to focus on either the big object or its component shapes, and indicate whether they were square or triangular.
Both groups recognised the large shapes more quickly than small, embedded ones, but the Calvinists picked out the smaller shapes 30 milliseconds faster than atheists, on average - a small, but significant, difference, reports New Scientist.
According to the lead expert, this could reflect a greater focus on self than external distractions for Calvinists.
He suggests it may even be a cognitive consequence of their religion and speculates that Calvinists might be more inward looking than atheists because they have lived their whole lives with an emphasis on minding their own business.
The study has been published in the journal PLoS ONE. (ANI)
(Excerpt) Read more at in.news.yahoo.com ...
—practice makes perfect........we really DO see the world differently.
How weird.
The FOOL has said in his heart, ‘there is no God.’
as Scripture rightly asserts.
That’s no excerpt; it’s the entire article!
One shouldn’t expect group means to be the same. There is random variation. I could conclude that the difference is “statistically significant,” because it was reported, but I might be wrong. Interesting article. Time will tell if this finding holds up.
(Scratching head)...Uh - K...?
Colonel, USAFR
Do not use potty language - or references to potty language - on the Religion Forum.
Oops. I offer a sincere apology. I overlooked that it was posted in Religion (had clicked from "Latest Articles").
It's probably the same with the Atheists ~ they can't see the smaller items as fast because, alas, they can't ~ and are satisfied to not do so anyway.
People who regularly use large quantities of narcotics have similar problems in perception.
Possibly the source is the same in all cases. I think the folks in the study should have included a blood sample for close examination,
read later
This will also have the same effect.
Only a secular humanist could write this stuff and understand it simultaneously.
Where in Europa would they find 40 Dutch Calvinists?
It's pretty clear that that the test established that the two groups had a physiological response ~ not only that, they found that one group, the religious folks, had a visual perception that was 30 milliseconds faster than the non-religious folks.
This is well outside the sort of difference expected from "random variation". Although you can't exactly describe human vision in terms of "frame rate" (since the eye is not a camera but has a variety of inputs), you can evaluate this particular phenomenon in terms of persistence of rhodopsin (visual purple) (and several other chemicals involved in vision).
These chemical processes are usually described in terms of the number of femto-seconds involved.
Not likely there's any sort of "random variation" in this process that can aount for the 30 millisecond variation observed.
Has to be something more basic, possibly the genetically driven chemical structure of the nerves themselves.
Could this be one of the signs of incipient speciation ~ ?
It would help me if 30 milliseconds were put into proportion. How long does each group take for a perception? What is the percentage difference between the two groups?
“Could this be one of the signs of incipient speciation ~ ?”
Perhaps. But if it up to neanderthals like Christopher Hitchens, the theistic will be killed off. It would be a case of perverse selection. You see this in the TV show “Survivor.” The weakest individuals with the least integrity conspire every week to vote off the person with the greatest perceived merit. The show is usually survivor of the least fit. At the end, the weakest, least intelligent, most inept, most obnoxious person struggles to articulate their grand strategy that brought victory.
Did some people believe that race was a sign of incipient speciation? If we are going to take evolution and speciation seriously, it’s an obvious question. However, this is a forbidden topic.
By the way, I laughed when I heard a sentence from the introductory narration of the first X-Men movie: “evolution started again.” It’s about time.
See "Shaka", "Shaka Zulu", "Zulu", "Zulu Dawn".
Oh, yes that's the way you do it ~
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