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Hi,
I’m an ex JW (actually I’m inactive), based in Italy, but I spent some months last year in New York.
My job is based on biomedical field (Biomedical Engineer). In a previous job I used to work on a fMRI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging) that is one of major (and newest) technique to understand and try to explain the brain and it functions from a structural point of view.The way it works is quite simple. Basically you put the patient in a MRI scanning, giving him some stimuli (as images to see, button to push in consequence of patterns, etc). The post processing is able to see which areas of brain is activated during the stimulus.
I'm writing here regarding an idea that I had last week.
The idea is investigating an appropriate methodology of analysis using fMRI tool in order to discover which area of the brain is active when people belonging to a sub-culture with strong identity (eg. like JWs) are stimulated.
For instance the stimuli may be sentences based on WT and Awake or moral / ethics choice, social matters etc etc.
The test (and related stimulus) need to be designed in cooperation with a Neuroscientist, Psychologist or Neurologist/Neurophysiologist or a team in which this people is cooperating with a Bioengineers people.
Basically my hypothesis is that JW’s folks develops a peculiar kind of “spirituality” that is more related to the activation of the UTILITARIAN BRAIN area, instead of other brain areas delegated for spirituality, consciences matter, free will God relationship. Is clear that the results are depending on subject and my previous instance has not an absolute value. So is important to choice with criteria people involved in the study.
Submitting to the same stimuli pattern, could be interesting compare people from different religious background and see if there are relevant difference in the activation areas. Otherwise, could be interesting compare people that are in a transition condition (eg. no longer in “well standing” , inactive ..) and monitoring initial and final activation areas.
This could be the first “Neurotheological” job based on JW’s in which we are discussing about something that gives empirical data.
My hope is to find someone over there in USA (by far in advance in this kind of researches), reading this forum and sharing common cult leaving experiences willing to establish a contact and discuss all the above.
Please guys, if you know someone involved in this field at University that is able to work on MRI device (3T or much powerful), will strongly appreciate if you let me know.
Thanks for your help, hope to hear from you