Religion in the brain
A couple of recent articles have examined how religious beliefs and feelings are related to the activity and anatomy of the brain. Together they provide an interesting look at the neuropsychology of religion.
Belief in religious statements and everyday facts
Sam Harris, who has written several books on atheism and is currently working on a doctorate in neuroscience, is one of the authors of a paper that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in Christians and nonbelievers when they evaluated the truth of religious and nonreligious statements. Standard caveats about fMRI and small sample sizes (30 subjects, 15 each believers and non-believers) apply, but still, the results are intriguing.
In a nutshell: the brain areas associated with believing or disbelieving a statement are essentially the same whether the statement is about religion or not. It’s hard to know how this translates into felt experience—whether accepting the truth of the Virgin Birth yields the same feeling of certainty as accepting that the Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic in 1937— but evidently the brain is doing pretty much the same thing, regardless of the content of the belief. Religious belief, in other words, is not some special brain process different from belief in more empirically verifiable things. However, there are some differences in the brain areas involved in accepting or rejecting religious statements and ordinary facts: the former appears to involve areas of the brain crucial to emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while the latter has more to do with networks involved in memory retrieval.
This article from Newsweek offers an interesting summary and interpretation of the work. The paper itself was published in PLoS, so you can easily access the whole thing yourself: The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, by Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen. PLoS ONE, October 1, 2009. There’s a lot of interesting background in the article.
Differences in neuroanatomy between believers and nonbelievers
The second study looked at the neuroanatomy of religiosity, a cluster of traits associated with religious beliefs, feelings, and behavior. In this study, structural magnetic resonance imaging was used to determine the volume of various brain areas in 40 adults who showed different degrees of religiosity based on their responses to a survey.
Analysis of the resulting data revealed four components of religiosity: a feeling of closeness to God, religious behavior, fear of God, and a group of traits linked to pragmatism and skepticism about God’s existence. Each component was associated with increased volume of a particular brain area (the first two traits were both associated with the same area). Religious upbringing did not affect the volume of any of the areas identified.
In a nutshell: the areas of the brain associated with religious behavior and both intimacy with and fear of God have been linked in previous studies with social cognition, including the ability to understand the emotions of others, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions, particularly in response to negative stimuli, and the use of symbolic language.
The study raises a whole bunch of interesting questions, like the chicken-and-egg question of whether people’s brains change in response to their religious feelings and practices or whether an existing brain difference predisposes people to religious feelings and practices (I would guess it might be some of both).
This article from Wired discusses the results (hat tip to Chuck for passing this along), and this article from Ars Technica also covers this research. And again, thanks to PLoS, you can read the whole paper yourself: Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity, by Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. PLoS ONE, September 28, 2009. Again, lots of cool background and some interesting conjecture in the article.
