They literally have a condition called cognitive anosognosia -- the same concomitant disease as schizophrenics have that prohibits them from insight into the fact that they are babbling incoherently rather than being rational. This isn't facetious -- it's the scientific fact of the matter. Cognitive anosognosia in schizophrenia is correlated with a failure to maintain activation of the TPN due to lesioning of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140620/
There are self-administered, validated tools as well, such as the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS),11 which is based on a separation of the concepts of “cognitive insight” and “clinical insight.” Clinical insight is described as the awareness of mental illness requiring treatment, while cognitive insight encompasses the patient’s ability to evaluate, reappraise, and modify distorted beliefs or misperceptions. These interpretations are regulated at a “higher level” of cognition, also called metacognition, allowing clinicians to assess self-regulating and self-monitoring functions of thought processes. The BCIS assesses a patient’s objectivity about delusional thinking, previous errors, reattribution of false explanations, and ability to receive corrective information from others. It includes self-reflectiveness and self-certainty subscales in order to measure willingness and capacity to entertain alternate explanations and over-confidence in validity of beliefs.
The results showed a correlation between insight as measured by the BCIS self-reflectiveness index and lower gray matter volume in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). The VLPFC is involved in working memory and decision making. The findings suggest that a reduced VLPFC volume corresponds with a diminished capacity to entertain alternative explanations about one’s misperceptions leading to impairment in awareness of illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter...s#Ventrolateral_prefrontal_cortex_.28vlPFC.29
The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) is a subdivision of the prefrontal cortex. Its involvement in modulating existing behavior and emotional output given contextual demands has been studied extensively using cognitive reappraisal studies and emotion-attention tasks. Cognitive reappraisal studies indicate the vlFPC’s role in reinterpreting stimuli, and reducing or augmenting responses. Studies using emotion-attention tasks demonstrate the vlFPC’s function in ignoring emotional distractions while the brain is engaged in performing other tasks.[6]
http://childhood-developmental-diso...or-the-maturing-adolescent-brain.php?aid=8553
Prefrontal activation in the dlPFC and vlPFC was also associated with deactivation in the DMN, during experiential focus and without previous training [24]. The engagement of prefrontal areas seems concomitant to the disengagement of limbic and DMN systems.
https://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924-977X(17)31999-5/pdf
IPC and VLPFC belong to the ventral attentional network that supports attentional filtering and reorienting towards the environment (Corbetta et al., 2008), and is anti-correlated with the preACC/DMN, involved in self- referential processes ( Fox and Raichle, 2007).
It's the same neurological activation pattern that neurotypicals manifest when they are exposed to socioculturally pertinent stimuli:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589
Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence
...
Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world.
Same as religious people manifest when exposed to their religious oriented materials:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ous-people-emotional-not-think-logically.html
Religious people 'cling to certain beliefs' even when they contradict evidence because they are overly emotional and irrational, study claims
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160323151838.htm
"When there's a question of faith, from the analytic point of view, it may seem absurd," said Tony Jack, who led the research. "But, from what we understand about the brain, the leap of faith to belief in the supernatural amounts to pushing aside the critical/analytical way of thinking to help us achieve greater social and emotional insight."
Which is why they laugh at the scriptures of other religions:
http://www.mrm.org/coriantumr-and-shiz
Can a decapitated body lift itself up and gasp for breath? The Book of Mormon seems to say so. The story is found in the Book of Ether and recounts a sword fight between a Jaredite king named Coriantumr (Ether 12:1) and Shiz, the brother of Lib (Ether 14:17).
As the story goes, Lib was killed in a battle with Coriantumr’s army. As a result, Shiz followed Coriantumr in vengeful pursuit, burning cities and killing women and children along the way. Finally the two armies met near the seashore and gave battle for three days. After the third battle, Shiz wounded Coriantumr with “many deep wounds,” and he had to be “carried away as though he were dead.”
After recovering from his wounds, Coriantumr began to feel bad over the fact that “there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children.” He attempted to make peace with Shiz, but Shiz agreed only if he would be allowed to kill Coriantumr with his own sword. Well, this only infuriated Coriantumr’s people, and so the fighting started all over again.
Eventually the armies meet. For several days men, women, and children fight relentlessly until only Coriantumr and Shiz remain. Ether 15:29 states that in the course of the battle, “Shiz had fainted with the loss of blood.” Taking advantage of the situation, Coriantumr took his sword and “smote off the head of Shiz.” But that isn’t the end. Verse 31 reports that “after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died.” The question is, how can a man without a head raise himself and also struggle for breath?
Click to expand...
Simultaneously with believing in equally farfetched things.
https://www.thoughtco.com/jonah-and-the-whale-700202
Jonah was in the giant fish three days. God commanded the whale, and it vomited the reluctant prophet onto dry land. This time Jonah obeyed God. He walked through Nineveh proclaiming that in forty days the city would be destroyed. Surprisingly, the Ninevites believed Jonah's message and repented, wearing sackcloth and covering themselves in ashes.
It's because they process the scripture of other religions with their TPNs but the scripture of their own religion causes them to deactivate their evolutionarily modern cognition's neural substrate and to activate their DMN -- which is literally ancestral cognition's neural substrate that is incapable of logic or rationality. They manifest literally the sympomtatology of cognitively anosognosic schizophrenics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140620/
Anosognosia in Schizophrenia: Hidden in Plain Sight
...
“I don’t need medicine—there is nothing wrong with me. I just came here for a check-up.”
Presentation is similar to in stroke patients:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945214003359
Essentially, anosognosic patients hold quasi-delusional beliefs about their paralysed limbs, in spite of all the contrary evidence, repeated questioning, and logical argument.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...05/anosognosia-psychopathy-and-the-conscience
Anosognosia is defined as the impaired ability of patients with neurological disorders to recognize the presence or adequately appreciate the severity of their deficits [1]. Torrey (2012) cites three examples of anosognosic patients; a stroke victim with a paralyzed arm claimed he couldn’t lift it because he had a shirt on; a woman with paralysis in her left arm was asked to raise it, and instead raised her left leg. When this was pointed out to her she responded that some people call it an arm, others a leg, and jokingly inquired as to the difference; the Supreme Court Justice, William Douglas, was paralyzed on his left side. He claimed this was a myth, and was still inviting people to go hiking [2].
They are literally socioculturally selectively convergently psychotic cognitively anosognosic schizophrenics:
http://www.faceofmalawi.com/2017/07/religious-people-have-mental-illness-neuroscientist-warns/
A professor at Stanford University, Robert Sapolsky, has said that religion is a mental illness, and that the behaviours exhibited by ‘prophets’ in religious texts are diagnosable acts.
The self-described atheist, who is also a neuroendocrinologist, argues that religion is comparable to a shared schizophrenia.
https://philarchive.org/archive/VANRCA-8
In this paper, I examine the relationship between social cognition and religious cognition. Many cognitive theories of religion claim that these two forms are somehow related, but the details are usually left unexplored and insights from theories of social cognition are not taken on board.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...see-purpose-behind-the-events-in-their-lives/
Some experts theorize that certain schizophrenia symptoms (for instance, paranoia) arise in part from a hyperactive sense of social reasoning. “I’d guess that they’d give lots of teleological answers; more than neurotypical people, and certainly far more than people with Asperger’s,” Heywood says.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140620/
The DMN is involved with processes of self-reflection, social cognition, and mind-wandering. Hyperconnectivity has been noted in the DMN of individuals at high risk for developing schizophrenia.
Whitfield-Gabrieli et al39 studied patients with schizophrenia; young, at-risk, first-degree relatives; and unaffected controls using fMRI during alternating conditions of wakeful rest and a focused working memory task. While the unaffected controls showed predictable deactivation of DMN during active task, the patients and relatives showed diminished deactivation, as well as greater activity in right DLPFC. This finding has essentially been replicated twice by two other research groups.
Socioculturally pertinent stimuli induce reproducible states of cognitively anosognosic psychotic decompensation in them:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805169/
Finally, we have demonstrated that attention to engaging social stimuli not only activates the DMN but also deactivates the TPN. In a subsequent study[30] it was shown that this pattern of DMN activation and TPN deactivation was present for humanizing depictions of individuals, whereas dehumanizing depictions, which are associated with decreased moral concern, either involved decreased activity in the DMN or increased activity in the TPN. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are neurologically constrained from simultaneously exercising moral concern and analytic thinking.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149989
Engaging social stimuli are associated with activation of the DMN and deactivation of the TPN, whereas analytic problems are associated with activation of the TPN and deactivation of the DMN.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160323151838.htm
"These findings," Friedman continued, "are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral."
The so-called "moral truth" is quite literally a socially shared delusion that they reference in place of the empirical truth of actual reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
Social position determines one's ability to define and construct reality; therefore, the higher one's social position, the greater his or her moral value.
http://www.healthline.com/health/psychosis
What is psychosis?
Psychosis is characterized by an impaired relationship with reality. And it is a symptom of serious mental disorders. People who are psychotic may have either hallucinations or delusions.
Autistic people are protected from this because we have vestigialized the neural substrate of their ancestral cognition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
ASD-related patterns of low function and aberrant activation in the brain differ depending on whether the brain is doing social or nonsocial tasks.[97] In autism there is evidence for reduced functional connectivity of the default network, a large-scale brain network involved in social and emotional processing, with intact connectivity of the task-positive network, used in sustained attention and goal-directed thinking. In people with autism the two networks are not negatively correlated in time, suggesting an imbalance in toggling between the two networks, possibly reflecting a disturbance of self-referential thought.[98]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_vestigiality
In the context of human evolution, human vestigiality involves those traits (such as organs or behaviors) occurring in humans that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Although structures called vestigial often appear functionless, a vestigial structure may retain lesser functions or develop minor new ones. In some cases, structures once identified as vestigial simply had an unrecognized function.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/154f/9a7fb5f1ee00c34f2d918db9825ca5b09f17.pdf
Both identify areas in the DMN and TPN associated with System 1 and System 2 reasoning respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
System 2 in humans
System 2 is evolutionarily recent and specific to humans.
