Put a microphone in front of a conservative talk show host and an adjunct professor of statistics from Cornell who also claims to study the philosophy of science...while seeming to specialize is climate denial...and you shouldn't expect anything good to happen.

So Joe Miller had a guest named William Briggs. The subject du jour was recent research by psychologists at UCLA and the University of York that indicates that both religious belief and nativism can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.

The researchers targeted the posterior medial frontal cortex, a part of the brain located near the surface and roughly a few inches up from the forehead that is associated with detecting problems and triggering responses that address them.

In the study, half of the participants received a low-level “sham” procedure that did not affect their brains, and half received enough energy to lower activity in the target brain area. Next, all of the participants were first asked to think about death, and then were asked questions about their religious beliefs and their feelings about immigrants.

The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, reveal that people in whom the targeted brain region was temporarily shut down reported 32.8% less belief in God, angels, or heaven. They were also 28.5% more positive in their feelings toward an immigrant who criticised their country.

People often turn to ideology when they are confronted by problems. We wanted to find out whether a brain region that is linked with solving concrete problems, like deciding how to move one’s body to overcome an obstacle, is also involved in solving abstract problems addressed by ideology.

We decided to remind people of death because previous research has shown that people turn to religion for comfort in the face of death. As expected, we found that when we experimentally turned down the posterior medial frontal cortex, people were less inclined to reach for comforting religious ideas despite having been reminded of death.

--Dr. Keise Izuma, University of York

These findings are very striking, and consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are repurposed to also produce ideological reactions. However, more research is needed to understand exactly how and why religious beliefs and ethnocentric attitudes were reduced in this experiment.

--Dr, Colin Holbrook, UCLA, lead author

Of course, Miller and Briggs had a whole different emphasis for the story.

Basically what they’re doing is they’re trying to bring back eugenics even, in a way. Because they’re identifying what they say are biological constituents for belief. Therefore they’re able to test for these biological constituents.

--Briggs, who worried that people might think he was joking or paranoid

Miller decided to go where even Briggs feared to tread.

Miller then hinted that the magnets may be used by transgender people against people of faith.

The whole transgender crowd, they see their main opponent as being those of faith and so obviously they’re going to use any aggressive tactics they can to move forward that agenda.

This is still minority opinion though, right? In psychology and elsewhere?

--Miller

I don’t think it’s minority opinion anymore.

--Briggs

So...see? We don't need to invade your restrooms and locker rooms to wreak havoc on society.