Religion in the Brain

Most scientific speculation and research into the human phenomenon of religious beliefs and experiences have tended to view religion as a highly specialized type of experience that would most likely be represented (or produced) in equally specialized brain areas or circuits. Initially, temporal lobe structures were thought to be fairly obvious suspects in this endeavor, because many researchers focused their attention on unusual emotional, cognitive, or perceptual religious/spiritual "experiences," and the temporal lobes are certainly involved in phenomena that either resemble, or are the same as, intensely emotional religious experiences, and pathological religiosity. At one time there was a bit of a stir about something called the "God spot" or a "God module."

More recently, researchers have begun to see religious experiences as multifaceted, and also as much more similar to normal psychological processes than had been previously thought. For most people, religious experience includes beliefs, ideas, hopes, memories, behavior, and emotions--in other words, all the "stuff" of psychological functioning. Very likely, then, the religious aspects of human life are represented and supported (or even "created") in the brain by the same processes and structures that are involved in all other mental processes.

Recently, the neuroscience blog NeuroWhoa! posted a very nice summary of these recent ideas and findings. Here's an excerpt:

Religious feelings co-opt different brain circuits, those that are engaged in... mundane pursuits such as politics, music, food, and so on. On the face of it, this theory makes much more sense. Religion, like many things, has many facets including contemplation, group activities, dietary requirements, social obligations, and many others, and so it stands to reason that these activites are moderated by the same neural circuits that moderate them in non-religious contexts! In fact the paper, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, claims to reveal three psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge) in networks that process Theory of Mind (ToM) regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics and imagery. ToM, in short, is the ability of individuals to understand their own and other people's mental states in terms of beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, etc. You know your own thoughts, and you know that other people have their thoughts too, because you have a Theory of Mind.

Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. discuss the aim of their research; to define the psychological structure of religious belief and to reveal the brain areas activated by the cognitive processes involved. They give a nod to previous "God Spot" research by acknowledging how they have largely focused on the neural correlates of rather vivid and unusual experiences, sufferers of temporal-lobe epilepsy (which was mainly responsible for linking religiosity with the limbic structures), executive/prosocial aspects of religion being linked to the frontal lobes, and mystical religious experiences being linked with decreased parietal lobe activity. They mention that all these findings rarely corresponded with each other and generally didn't succeed at discovering a psychological architecture that underlies religious belief. Regarding the dimensions, the authors mention that factor analytic studies showed how the perception of God's involvement and anger are key components of belief, and this formed their first hypothesis that these concepts would quite naturally be related with the prefrontal and posterior regions of the ToM structure that deal with intent and emotion. Remember, ToM is the ability to understand one's own and others' mental states, so it stands to reason that understanding God's involvment in world affairs or his being angry for some reason or other fits nicely under ToM conceptions of intent and emotion. The second hypothesis proposed to test doctrinal knowledge being mediated by neural circuits processing abstract semantics, and that experiential knowledge engages circuits that process memory recall and imagery. The third hypothesis proposed that adoption of religious belief uses networks used in cognitive-emotional processing.

In other words, the experience of thinking about or believing in the existence of God is much the same, as far as the brain is concerned, as thinking about or believing in the existence of Julius Caesar; and the emotions involved in religious experience use the same brain circuitry that all other emotions use. This says nothing at all, of course, about whether religious beliefs are or are not true in any meaningful sense-- just that they do not require any specialized brain structures or circuits.