Like Santa, Microsoft's Big Teddy prototype [via Drudge] "knows when you are sleeping, and he knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake." Stored inside its hat and eyes are four microphones and one camera using Microsoft face-finding and sound-vocalization technology. On display at Microsoft's annual Tech Fest in Redmond, WA. (AP photo/Steve Shelton)
"If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done," says anthropologist-turned-psychologist Pascal Boyer. His tests on children "go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe," reports Guardian Unlimited [via Arts & Letters Daily] in an article that asks the question "Why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe?" Boyer continues re those youngsters who think everyone knows they've had their hand in the cookie jar:
It's a false belief, but it's good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything. The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us.
"So why do so many people believe?" asks the Guardian article:
By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.
As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Boyer.
What do the findings of neuroscientists unraveling the biological mechanisms behind religious experience have to do with a peeping teddy bear that runs on Microsoft Windows designed to help Mom keep tabs on Junior when she's out of the room or out of the house? "The vision behind this is to be two places at once," says Steven Bathiche, a Microsoft research and development program manager. That sounds like a spiritually enhancing out-of-body experience. More ominously, when a child's fantasy of being watched becomes reality based, does that make it too easy for parents to abuse their god-like role in a young child's universe?