 I'm pleased to introduce Michael Adam Ferguson. Glad to have him back presenting with us. Michael is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, specializing in functional imaging of the brain. He has authored and co-authored papers on the stability of large-scale brain networks, attention, and neuroplasticity in journals including neuroimage and proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences. He and his husband, J.Seth Anderson, identify as queer Mormons and feel a sense of calling to help reveal Mormonism to itself. He blogs at queermormons.org on the topics of neuroscience, religion, and queer theory. Please welcome Michael. There we go. Okay, after much ado. My name is Michael Ferguson again and I'm with a project called the Religious Brain Project. We're at the University of Utah and we've got some great collaborations with Brigham Young University as well as the Human Brain Institute at Cornell and the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard. I put this slide up here sort of with an ironic twist to it. So minds are simply what brains do is the phrase that Marvin Minsky uses to describe this relationship between mental and physical properties and I love how dismissive it is and this is often the type of dismissiveness that we get when we talk about religion. Mind is an incredibly complex phenomenological system. Brain is the most intricate physical system in the known universe, much less the relationship between the two that's dynamical. There's nothing simple about either one of those. As we move forward into the Western tradition of neuroscience investigation, the conversation often starts with René Descartes. Perhaps because he so famously asserted dualism that there was this metaphysical realm and this physical realm, at least that's how it's been popularly interpreted. But so Descartes talked about the pineal gland which is an anatomical structure in the brain being the interface between soul and body. Then we have what has been used in monism or materialism is a model of mind championed by Hegel which is dialectical in nature, gets into absolute ideals. As we move forward, we have Joseph Smith who takes this binary of dualism or monistic materialism and he queers it by saying it's actually a spectrum. Well, we have his spiritual stuff that's really the same spectrum of stuff as physical matter, it's just more refined. Then we had another wrecking ball come in and in this case it was the observations of evolutionary processes in the organic origins of life. So now one of the bright Mormon scholars to keep an eye on is Matt Bowman and he's been looking at the emergence of fundamentalism in American religion and in his new book, The Urban Pulpit, he discusses how a lot of religious fundamentalism in the United States is a reaction to poor articulations of theology and I think that that's really fascinating. As we look forward to what are some of the practical outcomes from studying religion from a biological perspective, one of them is a religious aim, it's to articulate a theology that fits into the most advanced sciences and understandings that we have of human neural systems. Bridging these worlds was William James and he championed pragmatism where we look at the measurable empirical outcomes of any type of religious system or belief and we assess them on those terms and he reminded quite wisely of the words of Jesus of the gospels that it's not by their roots ye shall know them, it's by their fruits ye shall know them. In essence, a lot of the metaphysical mechanistic questions are misplaced if the goal is to get to some type of veracity of goodness or assessments of morality. There's Mr. James. There are also some exciting potential bridges between neuro theology and neuro philosophy and like Chelsea was saying in the previous presentation, so many of these conversations really require a refined language in order to communicate in maximally effective ways between parties that might have fundamentally different propositional assumptions. Talking about the importance of studying religion and its dynamic influence with the brain, we can also look at this in terms of public health. Utah has recently been assessed as the one state in the United States that has the highest diagnosis of mental health illness. You can't think about Utah without thinking about Mormonism and religious energy. Whatever the relationship is as mitigated by complex third and fourth party dynamics or direct dynamic causality, these are questions that we really need to understand from the perspective of public health urgency. BYU is doing terrific work looking at social media and how that can be used for public health monitoring with suicidality and they just published a paper this year that looks at innovative ways for doing pattern analysis on social media data streams and seeing how those correlate to public health concerns. So there's a lot of untapped potential moving forward using social media in these intersections of religion and of public health. So what are we doing with the religious brain project? Well, this Monday we're sending out our first electronic questionnaire to 150 plus participants who volunteered for the study. We're gonna be doing metrics on personality, domains of religiosity, empathy, obsessiveness, moral cognition, and structure of prayer just to name some of our behavioral explorations. Psychology of religion increasingly is becoming an empirical data-driven pursuit and this is something that is new and that is exciting to see a lot of interdisciplinary work that's moving this field forward. So GIFs at the data stream. Once we begin collecting data, some of the things that we hope to do are look at behavioral clusters. If somebody measures high for a mental health risk to see okay, what are the patterns of the religiosity and practice that are correlated with that? What are domains of moral cognition that tend to correlate out with high levels of anxiety inside of an active LDS population? They're really great questions we can start to get at once the data comes in and we're able to look at correlations and the patterns. We're also gonna be doing neurophysiological data. This is where our subject goes into the scanner. I primarily work with functional magnetic resonance imaging and associated analyses. We are gonna be looking at a sample size of 20 individuals to begin with and we want more than that, the higher your sample size, the more powerful your outcomes are gonna be. The method that we're gonna be starting with is functional connectivity and this is one that is relatively new and hasn't really permeated the popular dialogue yet so look for this one to be coming through the New York Times pipeline but functional connectivity takes bold signals so blood oxygen level dependent signal which is a neurophysiological marker and you can look at the time series from one region how it is similar and different from the time series in other regions and then that gives you a way to understand which regions in the brain are most co-activated, which ones are for shorthand, which ones are talking to each other most frequently and we put that together and that becomes what we call the human connectome. Each individual person, we can document the matrix of how their brain is uniquely laid out functionally so that correlations in one region can be reflected in networks that we know functions and we know how these networks operate with one another. We're also gonna be doing some task-based material so with the functional connectivity data it's just a person lying in a wakeful resting state it's a task neutral state in the scanner and they're just told to let their mind wander so we're looking at default processes with task-driven data we're gonna be having them watch general conference videos, Mormon messages, engaging in personal prayer, reading scriptural passages and listening to hymns. They're gonna also have a button that they can depress when they're feeling the spirit as they identify that and so using the lexicon of the religious culture that we're studying in order to assess a particular biological response is gonna hopefully give us some neuroanatomy for core features of Mormon spirituality. What we can then do is look at the domains from the behavioral data and correlate them with the networks that we're seeing as participatory in Mormon spirituality. So for example, let's take some of our high spirit feelers. These are people who report a high affective intensity and frequency of spiritual ecstasy. What we can then do is look at those hubs within the neural network for spiritual responsiveness and assess whether there's a heightened correlation between the hubs, excuse me, in those neural regions and there'll be little nubs of activity everywhere. What we can do that is ask questions about neuroplasticity. Let's imagine a longitudinal study where you have the same subjects at multiple time points and you have somebody before an LDS mission and then you look at their functional neural patterns after an LDS mission and you assess what are the long-term plastic effects of neural modulation post-missionary experience in the LDS culture. You can control age match, subtract out pure developmental effects and then you can start to, I mean from there the sky's the limit as far as the data that you could process in order to fine-tune if the goal is to enhance the quality of spiritual life. I mean, again, lots of directions that you could go depending on the questions of interest. There's a big trend within neural imaging data to do open-source sharing and I think this is fantastic, especially for an organization that has altruistic and technological motivations like the Mormon Transhumanist Association. There are beautiful data sets to data mine. If that would be something that people in the association would be interested in training on, I mean, I'm sure that we could work out some cool cooperativity there. I think that there's a high opportunity to understand religious culture within America. Baylor University has done some fabulous work that took principal components of attribution responses for the personality of the God that they worship and the core axes were authoritative, benevolent, critical and distant. The Human Neuroscience Institute at Cornell that we'll be working with has recently published neural data where you can take somebody, put them in the scanner, have them infer empathetically the personality type of another individual and based on the regions that are co-activated in the brain determine the personality type of the individual that they're interacting with for whom they're developing theory of mind. So combine those two together. You could look at the, I mean, I shouldn't say this, like it's a done deal. There would have to be a lot of rigorous research in order to get a positive result, but hypothetically it's possible to infer the personal characteristics that someone attributes to the divinity of their choice. Cross-cultural empathy in order to look at moral cognition within other religious cultures, within other scales of devotion and of literality in the same domain, the same religious group and opportunities to create empathic scaffolding in order to bridge some of these moral cognitive differences that end up having ill social consequences across religious driven groups. Imagine communities, it's one of the fantastic works coming out of the humanities, it's looking at the role that imagination plays in the active process of community participation and neurobiological molecular bonding with those you imagine to be in your community. Ending with this quote by Henry Eyring, who is the current first presidency elder Eyring's father. So Henry Eyring said, "'A purpose of science is to separate the grain of truth "'from the shaft of error.'" And I think that the Mormon Transhumanist Association embodies this principle of faith, hope and charitable application of all of the means given to us. And as far as investigation and exploration having the openness to the errors of the chaff of our scientific models pulled away by better data. So thank you very much and I'll take any questions. Are we out of time? Okay, then I will not take questions, but I'll be around. Michael, one question? Yeah. If you want to contribute as far as data that you respond to surveys and get on the mailing list, go to religiousbrainproject.com under the volunteer tab. If you want to donate financially, there's also a donate tab there. And if you just want to check out what we're doing, then that is there as well.