Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as "true" or its rejection as "false" appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.
People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. 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. Trials with greater belief resistance showed increased response in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. We also found that participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD signal in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.
BackgroundWhile religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and others have looked specifically at religious belief [2]. However, no research has compared these two states of mind directly.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.Conclusions/SignificanceWhile religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.
Machine learning (ML) has become a popular tool for mining functional neuroimaging data, and there are now hopes of performing such analyses efficiently in real-time. Towards this goal, we compared accuracy of six different ML algorithms applied to neuroimaging data of persons engaged in a bivariate task, asserting their belief or disbelief of a variety of propositional statements. We performed unsupervised dimension reduction and automated feature extraction using independent component (IC) analysis and extracted IC time courses. Optimization of classification hyperparameters across each classifier occurred prior to assessment. Maximum accuracy was achieved at 92% for Random Forest, followed by 91% for AdaBoost, 89% for Naïve Bayes, 87% for a J48 decision tree, 86% for K*, and 84% for support vector machine. For real-time decoding applications, finding a parsimonious subset of diagnostic ICs might be useful. We used a forward search technique to sequentially add ranked ICs to the feature subspace. For the current data set, we determined that approximately six ICs represented a meaningful basis set for classification. We then projected these six IC spatial maps forward onto a later scanning session within subject. We then applied the optimized ML algorithms to these new data instances, and found that classification accuracy results were reproducible. Additionally, we compared our classification method to our previously published general linear model results on this same data set. The highest ranked IC spatial maps show similarity to brain regions associated with contrasts for belief > disbelief, and disbelief < belief.
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