Neuropeptides Alter Level of Skepticism

Here’s a really interesting tidbit from the latest Rationally Speaking podcast:

“Degrees of ability to withstand cognitive dissonance vary in the human population … We know in fact that you can alter those chemically. You can alter the proportion of certain neuropeptides in the brain and all of a sudden turn a skeptic into a true believer, and vice versa. You can do experiments where people are shown a fuzzy screen where there is actually no image, and they’re asked, “What image do you see?” And people who are generally gullible will see something, and people who are skeptical don’t see anything. But then you give them a chemical neuropeptide, and the skeptics all of sudden start seeing patterns.”