Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing
Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2014 11:38 am
Better late than never is a good thing, even if the delay is measured in many thousands of years. Western medical science is just now discovering that the mind is powerful and placebo works.
Shamans have implicitly known this since they began ritually treating patients perhaps 40,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic transition. In fact, one of the better hypotheses regarding the adaptiveness of invisible agent-agency ideas (improperly called “religion”) revolves around shamanic placebo healing. In Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (2001), James McClenon contends that what we today call “religion” evolved because ancestral humans who believed in spiritual healing powers had a much greater chance of actually being healed. These differential healing effects, even if statistically minor at any given time or place, become enormous over evolutionary time.
Read More : http://www.anonymousmags.com/neuroscien ... c-healing/
Shamans have implicitly known this since they began ritually treating patients perhaps 40,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic transition. In fact, one of the better hypotheses regarding the adaptiveness of invisible agent-agency ideas (improperly called “religion”) revolves around shamanic placebo healing. In Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (2001), James McClenon contends that what we today call “religion” evolved because ancestral humans who believed in spiritual healing powers had a much greater chance of actually being healed. These differential healing effects, even if statistically minor at any given time or place, become enormous over evolutionary time.
Read More : http://www.anonymousmags.com/neuroscien ... c-healing/