W. Davd Phillips

The Trusting Brain

Since my dissertation included a good bit of brain research, I subscribed to a number of blogs of scientists and brain researchers. One is called “The Frontal Cortex“, which is part of Science Blogs. This morning they have an article on trust and the brain.  The article primarily concerns the economic struggles our country finds itself in and to what degree we will trust the government, business leaders, and our own understanding of the economy. However, the research has implications for our own trust in the Godhead.

The Relevant Study

The writer, Jonah Lehrer, describes a 2005 study led by several Neuroscientists regarding trust.

The research was born out of a serious limitation of conventional fMRI, which looks at the brain by itself. (An individual is put in a claustrophobic scanner and told to perform a task.) Humans, of course, are a social species, so the scientists (led by Montague) pioneered a technique known as hyper-scanning, which allows subjects in different fMRI machines to interact in real time.

The experiment revolved around a simple economic game in which getting the maximum reward required the strangers to trust one another. However, if one of the players grew especially selfish, he or she could always steal from the pot and erase the tenuous bond of trust. By monitoring the players’ brains, the scientists were able to predict whether or not someone would steal money several seconds before the theft actually occurred. The secret was a cortical area known as the caudate nucleus, which closely tracked the payouts from the other player. (The caudate is usually discussed in the context of addiction, since it plays a central role in modulating our expectation of pleasure.) Montague noticed that whenever the caudate exhibited reduced activity, trust tended to break down.

But what exactly is the caudate computing? How do we decide whom to trust with our money? And why do we sometimes decide to stop trusting those people? At first the caudate didn’t get excited until the subjects actually trusted one another and garnered their separate rewards. But over time this brain area started to expect trust, so that it fired long before the reward actually arrived. Of course, if the bond was broken – if someone cheated and stole money – then the neurons stopped firing; social assumptions were proven wrong.

The moral is that trust is ultimately about the expectation of rewards. Trust may be an admirable social trait, but it’s ultimately rooted in a greedy calculation, emanating from our primal dopamine reward circuitry:

Taken together, these results suggest that the head of the caudate nucleus receives or computes information about (i) the fairness of a social partner’s decision and (ii) the intention to repay that decision with trust. In early rounds of the game, the ”intention to trust” is evident only after an investment is revealed. With experience, this signal shifts to a time preceding the revelation of the investment.

What does this have to do with the economy? Over the last few decades, investors have grown accustomed to predictable rewards coming from the financial markets. We were used to our 7 percent return in the stock market, that 4.5 percent return from a money fund, and that 2 percent return from our bank account. We assumed our homes would always increase in value. In other words, these “rewards” were taken for granted. (It hasn’t helped that the last severe recession arrived in the early 1980′s, more than 25 years ago. People forgot that these financial rewards were contingent, just like the players in the trust game who were shocked that someone would abscond with their cash.)

When those rewards disappear – when home prices fall, and borrowers default, and the markets flatline – the end result is a collapse in the bonds of trust that all markets depend on. The problem, of course, is that restoring trust is ultimately about rewards, not reassuring statements or grand plans from Congress. Until those financial rewards start to feel predictable again – and that may take a long, long time – investors will continue to be wary of each other, just like people who got burned in the brain scanner.

The Impact on Life and the Gospel

The results of this study has a great impact for life and how we share the Gospel. Our trust in the Godhead comes only after levels of expectation and reward are observed and received. In other words, trust has to be developed; we do not give God our trust blindly. God, from the moment we are born, sets out to earn our trust. In earning our trust, we then can transition from the God who wants to be in relationship with us, to the the “Santa Claus” view of God to the deeply relational, Fatherly view of God.

In the midst of this process, we have to de-trust God in order to trust him deeper. Our brain has to have it’s’ neurons re-wired so that we can not only trust him more relationally but we can change our behavior in the trusting process. Our brains get wired in a certain way such that our thoughts and actions become automatic. However, to re-wired our brain and allow God to take us places through faith we could never other otherwise go, we have to de-trust what we already know. Then, and only then, can those new trusting circuits be rebuilt.

The reward changes during this process as well. We move from the Santa Claus view of God, where he gives us stuff, and helps us out (reward), to a deep relationship with the Father where the reward is the relationship. That takes a series of trusts and de-trusts where our reward changes over time.

This is what St. John of the Cross called the dark night(s) of the soul. It’s the Chrysalis of Alan Jamison. We will all have a series of stops and starts, a series of trusts and de-trusts, in our relationship with God.

Yet it has great impact on how we share the Gospel. We have to concede that blind trust is not given by humans to God without any relationship whatsoever. Could it be that our starting place is to discover how and in whom people have seen the activity of God. That becomes the starting point, not where will a person will spend eternity when they die. This may have worked in years past because people had some experience with God. However, fewer people have a positive experience with God, assuming they have any, and are less likely to understand that question, accept your premise of them being sinners and needing heaven, or even want to engage you in that conversation. Despite a belief in “God”, experience with Jesus or his followers is minimal. Our starting point, then, is wrong. Our starting point should be discovering what, if any, activity they perceive (or we help them understand) of how God and Jesus has worked in their life to move them to a point of actually being able to trust.

This isn’t brain surgery. It is not rocket science. It is time and relationships and a discernment by us of what the Spirit has done in their life to move them closer to Jesus.