The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief

Abstract

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.

Processes of believing — a review and conceptual account

“…Increased uncertainty during such an evidence accumulation was associated with activity at the transition zone of the anterior cingulate to the medial frontal cortex, whereas greater underconfi dence was related to activity in mid-dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Harris et al , 2008 ;Stern et al , 2010 ). Interestingly, the dorsal medial frontal cortex was shown to be active when Christian subjects were engaged in religious thinking (Harris et al , 2009 ).…”

The Franciscan Prayer Elicits Empathic and Cooperative Intentions in Atheists: A Neurocognitive and Phenomenological Enquiry

“…These differences are not present among nonbelievers, who manifest superior parietal activity for both kinds of moral judgments. These findings may suggest that Catholic practices influence moral judgments through learning to help and care for others (deontological judgment), but inhibit decisions that may damage other people even if this damage represents welfare for others (utilitarian judgment) (Christensen et al, 2014).Regarding attribution and the self, activation in the insular cortex is reported when believers and nonbelievers judge whether religious statements are true or false, such as "Jesus Christ really performed the miracles attributed to him in the Bible" (Harris et al, 2009). Since insular functions relate to representing internal states, empathy, and experiencing moral emotions (Mercadillo and Díaz, 2013;Mutschler et al, 2013;Decety and Cowell, 2014), its participation may involve morality and emotional processes inserted in religiosity.…”

Cybersemiotics and Human Modelling

“…They are the result of structures which are solely human in origin. Hence neurologists in the last decade have become interested in the parietal lobe's role in religious experience (for example, [67][68][69][70][71]). Or, to take a different example, the last fifteen years or so has seen widespread unease regarding the ultra-or post-modern idea that the world is constituted only by shifts in power and that, effectively, nothing exists beyond the polis.…”