Belief

42 cards about Belief, with explanations, methods and source links.

Cards about Belief

• Does meditation actually change the connections inside the brain?

  Saying that meditation changes the brain sounds like too large a claim, and it is hard to test without measuring something directly. In one small trial, adults under stress were assigned at random either to three days of mindfulness training or to three days of relaxation. What separated the two?

  Source: Creswell et al., Biological Psychiatry

• Why can repeated prayer change the rate of your breathing?

  Repeating words in rhythm sounds like a purely mental act, with no bodily side to it. To check whether that is right, participants recited a Latin prayer and a yogic mantra while instruments tracked their breathing, blood pressure, heart rate and cerebral blood flow. What happened to the body?

  Source: Bernardi et al., BMJ

• Can a painful ritual raise generosity toward a community?

  At the Thaipusam festival a mild ritual and a severe one, which involves piercing the body and carrying weights, run side by side. At the end participants were given money and decided for themselves how much to donate to the temple, and onlookers were asked too. What separated the groups?

  Source: Xygalatas et al., Psychological Science

• Does walking in step actually make us cooperate?

  Armies, communities and rituals come back again and again to marching, singing and dancing together, and it is easy to put that down to people simply enjoying themselves. To test whether the rhythm itself does something, participants walked in step or sang together and then played a game where you can give something up for the group. What happened in the game?

  Source: Wiltermuth & Heath, Psychological Science

• What brings dancers closer, moving together or working hard together?

  When a group dances together two things happen at once: the movements synchronize, and the body works. It is hard to tell which one does the bonding. In a dance experiment the researchers varied each separately, and measured pain threshold and a sense of connection to the group. What contributed to what?

  Source: Tarr et al., Biology Letters

• Meditation against chronic pain: real relief or an overstated promise?

  Mindfulness is a practice of turning attention to what is happening now, without rushing to judge or react, and it is offered today to people living with chronic pain. A review gathered the randomized trials in the field and examined what improved and what did not. What came out of them?

  Source: Hilton et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine

• Can a month inside a dense crowd actually improve how you feel?

  A month-long mass gathering in northern India involved crowding, noise and hard conditions, so you would expect the participants to come out feeling worse. The researchers compared pilgrims against people who did not take part, and asked both groups a month before and a month after. What happened to how they felt?

  Source: Tewari et al., PLOS ONE

• Does a park make people happy, or do happy people choose the park?

  When visitors to a park report feeling good, there are two possibilities: nature helped them, or people who already feel good are the ones drawn to nature in the first place. Interviews in Australia put the question to the visitors themselves. What did they say, and what is it worth?

  Source: Buckley, Journal of Sustainable Tourism

• Why do we feel small in front of an enormous view?

  The phrase “feeling small” before a mountain or a cathedral sounds like nothing more than a metaphor. To find out whether it is more than that, people who had just felt awe were asked to estimate the dimensions of their own body, in the laboratory and outdoors. What did they say?

  Source: van Elk et al., Collabra

• Does writing down what you are grateful for really change how you feel?

  A gratitude intervention asks you to write good things down regularly, or to write a letter of thanks. It sounds too easy to work, which is exactly why a randomized trial can test it. A review pooled dozens of them. What came out?

  Source: Diniz et al., einstein (São Paulo)

• Does an enormous waterfall make you more generous?

  Awe is the feeling before something large that briefly shrinks our place in the picture, and some argue it produces generosity. In one experiment people watched spectacular nature, neutral pictures, and everyday nature as a second comparison group, and both feeling and giving were recorded. What moved?

  Source: Joye & Bolderdijk, Frontiers in Psychology

• What did three laboratories report when they dated the Shroud of Turin?

  The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the figure of a man, and the argument over its age has run for centuries. In 1988 a single tiny piece was cut from it and divided between three laboratories working separately, each also receiving three control samples whose age was already known. What did the three report?

  Source: Damon et al., Nature

• What happened to the pulse of the spectators at a firewalking ritual?

  At a firewalking ritual there is the person who walks and the person who watches, and the usual assumption is that only the first has something happen in the body. Heart monitors went on the walkers, on relatives watching, and on unrelated spectators from the village. What did the measurements show?

  Source: Konvalinka et al., PNAS

• Why is it so hard to hear a speech inside an old abbey?

  Bare stone and a high ceiling return every sound for seconds after it was made, and that is what gives singing its depth. To find out what the same reverberation does to speech, an acoustic simulation of a Cistercian abbey was built from its archaeological dimensions and speech clarity measures were run on it. What came out along the hall?

  Source: Duran et al., Acoustics

• What happens to a small forest the community around it holds sacred?

  Scattered through the Western Ghats in India are groves that communities have protected for generations on religious grounds. They are small and ringed by coffee fields, and by every accepted ecological rule they ought to be emptying of species. What actually happens in them?

  Source: Bhagwat et al., Conservation Biology

• Does compassion meditation make people more generous?

  In loving-kindness meditation you repeat silent wishes of goodwill toward yourself and toward others, and the claim is that this produces real generosity. To test it, one group learned it in a six-week online course while another took a course of light physical exercise. What separated them?

  Source: Galante et al., Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being

• Why is it so much harder to show mindfulness helps when you compare it with another real treatment?

  Most trials of mindfulness compare people who took the programme with a waiting list: people who signed up and were asked to wait without receiving anything. Against nothing, any attention looks useful. What happens against a real alternative?

  Source: Goldberg et al., Perspectives on Psychological Science

• Does prayer at a distance change recovery from heart surgery?

  Intercessory prayer is prayer by people for patients they have never met. The STEP trial divided bypass patients into a group that received prayer and a group that did not, without their knowing, and a third group told with certainty that people were praying for them. What separated them?

  Source: Benson et al., American Heart Journal

• Why did the calendar lose ten days at once?

  The tropical year is slightly shorter than three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days, so the simple rule of a leap year every four years accumulates a drift. By the sixteenth century the drift had already pushed the dates of the seasons out of place. What was done about it?

  Source: Royal Observatory of Belgium

• How do scraps of paper from a synagogue reveal whole lives?

  In the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, no paper bearing Hebrew script or sacred content was ever thrown away, so hundreds of thousands of fragments accumulated there over centuries. But people wrote in Hebrew letters about things that are not sacred at all. What else was in the pile?

  Source: University of Cambridge

• Why do people set out on a pilgrimage with no religious motive?

  A pilgrimage sounds like a journey with a religious motive, and that is the assumption almost nobody checks. Researchers asked dozens of walkers on the St Olav Way in Norway why they set out. What did they answer?

  Source: Jørgensen et al., International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

• What makes a beer genuinely Trappist?

  A beer does not become Trappist through taste, color or a picture of an abbey on the label. The authentic label is granted by an international association, and it describes no style of beer at all but something else entirely. What exactly does it require?

  Source: International Trappist Association

• Why do Amish teenagers get a few years off from the rules?

  The Amish are the standard example of a community that lives by rules an outsider would call illiberal. And yet they release their teenagers from church rules for a year or more, which is when the popular image of wild years in the city comes from. What is that period for?

  Source: Mazie, Perspectives on Politics

• What happens when a Western child is recognized as a Tibetan master?

  Recognizing young children, mostly boys, as the reincarnations of masters who have died is one of the defining characteristics of Tibetan Buddhism. Since the tradition reached the West, a small handful of Westerners have been recognized this way. The system assumes a monastery raises the child. What did these children do?

  Source: Ary, in Little Buddhas, Oxford University Press

• Where do the postures in a yoga class actually come from?

  A yoga class is mostly postures, and the text everybody names as the source is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, from somewhere around 350 to 450 CE. The Sutras are a philosophical synthesis of earlier traditions, and the postural emphasis sits elsewhere in the history. So where does it sit?

  Source: White, Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism

• How old is the advice in the self-help aisle?

  Self-help is a multi-billion dollar industry, and the shelves refill with manuals promising previously undiscovered secrets of happiness. Cognitive therapies arrive with similar language about groundbreaking clinical impact. One author went looking for where the ideas came from, and found a school of philosophy waiting there.

  Source: Dickinson, Discover Psychology

• How far can a rule against harming living things be taken?

  Non-violence appears as a principle in several traditions, usually alongside others that soften it in practice. Jainism puts it at the center and defines living beings widely, down to the microscopic life in soil. Follow that strictly and ordinary acts become suspect. How far does it actually go?

  Source: Gorisse, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Whose voice is speaking in the Analects?

  Confucius is probably the most significant thinker in East Asian history, and the Analects is where people go to hear him. The text preserves dialogues and stories, and it also preserves a diversity of representations and concerns that later interpreters picked through. So whose words came out the other side?

  Source: Csikszentmihalyi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• What does going without food do inside a cell?

  Food deprivation and calorie restriction have long been credited with slowing aging, and fasting carries religious and popular claims of its own. Cells have a recycling process called autophagy, and nobody had gathered the evidence linking the two. A review set out to weigh it.

  Source: Bagherniya et al., Ageing Research Reviews

• What happens in the brain during OM chanting?

  Chanting OM aloud produces a sensation of vibration, and the authors note this has the potential to stimulate the vagus nerve through its auricular branches. Whether anything measurable follows in the brain had not been explored. Twelve volunteers went into a scanner to find out.

  Source: Kalyani et al., International Journal of Yoga

• Whose heart keeps time with a fire-walker?

  Collective rituals turn up in every known society, and what they do for the people who hold them has been argued over for a century. Field observers have long suspected that the effect reaches the audience and not only the performers. Heart rate offers a way to look for it without asking anyone how they felt.

  Source: Konvalinka et al., PNAS

• What was taken out of the whirling dervish ceremony?

  The Mevleviye are an ascetic Sufi order founded in Konya in 1273, known worldwide for a turning dance. Tourists meet it as a performance of about an hour. What a visitor sees and what the ceremony is are not the same thing, and a secular century sits between them.

  Source: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

• How do you build a church without stacking a single stone?

  Eleven medieval churches stand in a mountainous region in the heart of Ethiopia, some 645 km from Addis Ababa. Tradition attributes them to a king who wanted a New Jerusalem, after Muslim conquests halted Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. They look built, and the method is the opposite of building.

  Source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre

• How old is the story of the golem of Prague?

  The notion that a righteous person with esoteric wisdom could form an artificial human from inorganic matter has roots in the Talmud and in early kabbalistic ideas. Rabbi Elazar of Worms even set down instructions. The question is when that old idea became a story about one rabbi and one city.

  Source: Kieval, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe

• What exactly does a pilgrim do on the hajj?

  The hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that every adult Muslim must make at least once, and the fifth of the Five Pillars of Islam. From outside it looks like one enormous crowd around one building. It is in fact a fixed sequence of separate acts, spread over six days and several places.

  Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

• What does it take to start the highest grade of sacred fire?

  Zoroastrian veneration of fire began in an Indo-Iranian cult of the hearth fire, where the flame was the visible embodiment of the divinity Atar. A household fire is simply lit and then never allowed to go out. A great temple fire is not lit at all in the ordinary sense.

  Source: Boyce, Encyclopaedia Iranica

• Who takes part in the meal that ends a fast?

  Muslims keep Iftar at sunset through Ramadan, the ninth month of the lunar calendar, once the day’s religious and ceremonial rites are complete. The obvious reading is that it belongs to the people who fasted. UNESCO inscribed it in 2023 as something broader than that.

  Source: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

• What are the flower petals on the ground actually for?

  As the indigenous communities of Mexico keep it, el Día de los Muertos commemorates the transitory return to Earth of deceased relatives. The festivities run from the end of October into the beginning of November, which also completes the annual cycle of cultivating maize, the country’s predominant food crop.

  Source: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

• How much of the Sagrada Família is actually World Heritage?

  Seven properties built by Antoni Gaudí in and around Barcelona make up a serial World Heritage property, inscribed for his exceptional contribution to architecture and building technology. The basilica everyone photographs is on that list. Construction there has continued for a century after his death in 1926.

  Source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre

• What has to happen before you eat at the Golden Temple?

  The langar at Sri Darbar Sahib serves a free meal to more than 50,000 people every day, and past 100,000 on major festivals. Free food at that scale sounds like charity on an industrial scale. The tradition insists on a distinction that charity cannot make.

  Source: Golden Temple Amritsar

• What was actually secret about the Vatican Secret Archives?

  For centuries the institution carried the title Vatican Secret Archives, which is the name most people still use and the one every conspiracy relies on. Pope Francis dropped it in 2019. The explanation turns on what a single Latin word meant when the archive was founded.

  Source: Vatican Apostolic Archive

• Is a year of freedom enough to call leaving the Amish a choice?

  The Amish are often cited as a paradigm illiberal group, mistrustful of and separated from the modern world. Rumspringa complicates that image: at sixteen, Amish children are released from church strictures for a year or more to run around in violation of Amish norms, and only then decide whether to be baptized.

  Source: Mazie, Perspectives on Politics

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