Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion – Edited by Patrick McNamara

Hearth and Campfire Influences on Arterial Blood Pressure: Defraying the Costs of the Social Brain through Fireside Relaxation

“…Across three studies, I tested the common belief that staring into fires is relaxing, a rather noncontroversial supposition but one that lacked empirical support or explanations as to why fires might elicit said effect. I used a randomized, controlled pre-posttest paradigm that measured arterial blood pressure to investigate the model that fire's relaxing influence comes via hypnotic susceptibility (McClenon, 1997(McClenon, , 2002(McClenon, , 2006. Specifically, I hypothesized that just watching a fire without any other sensory stimuli would produce a hypnotic quiescence that would lower blood pressure relative to control conditions.…”

“…Humans possess the ability to moderate relaxation response via conscious cognitive processes, a capacity that has been attributed in part to fire manipulation, ritual behavior, and the hypnotic influence of hearth and campfires during human evolution (McClenon, 1997(McClenon, , 2002(McClenon, , 2006Rossano, 2007Rossano, , 2010. Relaxation response, a wakeful hypometabolic physiological state (Benson and Klipper, 2000) that deactivates or opposes stress response (Stefano et al, 2003), is an evolutionarily old and highly conserved function that is part of the negative feedback that deactivates stress response and has been directly linked to the alleviation of stress-related disease (Esch, Fricchione, and Stefano, 2003;Esch, Stefano, and Fricchione, 2002).…”

“…Theoretical approaches tend toward either a "psychiatric-adaptive" or an "anthropological-discursive" model (Seligman and Kirmayer, 2008). The evolutionary approach underlying ritual healing theory holds that dissociation is basically adaptive and functions to reduce or filter stress (Ludwig, 1983;McClenon, 2006), but in cultural manifestations dissociation also has social and rhetorical meanings (Seligman and Kirmayer, 2008). Although analogs appear in other species (Schauer and Elbert, 2010), it is important to acknowledge that dissociation is not a unified neural structure with a single essence-the varieties of dissociative phenomena simply share the trait of featuring cognitive mechanisms that relinquish or direct information processing away from the social self (Kirmayer, 1994).…”

“…As hominin ancestors sat around hearth and campfires, they may have experienced secondary relaxation benefits, particularly in the dark when other stimuli were limited and firelight was the only thing to see well or focus on (McClenon, 1997). At night, circadian rhythms and the properties of fire converge for hallucinatory effects, which may have influenced the emergence of religio-ritual behaviors (McClenon, 1997(McClenon, , 2002(McClenon, , 2006. Konner (1985) reports that among the !Kung San foragers of the Kalahari Desert, there was likely a synergy between the music, dancing, hyperventilation, smoke inhalation, and staring into flames that produced an effect unlike any other.…”

Evolution and religion : theory, definitions, and the natural selection of religious behavior

“…On the other hand, an adaptation could, at any point in time, correlate negatively with reproductive success for any number of reasons (see below), even though the trait was favored by natural selection in the past. Johnson & Bering 2006;Wilson 2002;Irons 2001;McNamara 2006). Another oftenproposed adaptive benefit of religion is its promotion of physical and mental health (Bulbulia 2006;McNamara, et al 2006;McClenon 2002;Newberg, et al 2001; for reviews of relevant literature see Hood, et al 1996: 377-405;Koenig, et al 2001).…”