Building on previous evidence showing that religious belief involves cognitive activity that can be mapped to specific brain regions, a new study has found that causal, directional connections between these brain networks can be linked to differences in religious thought. The article "Brain Networks Shaping Religious Belief" is published in Brain Connectivity.
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Dimitrios Kapogiannis and colleagues from the National Institute on Aging (National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD) and Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, IL, analyzed data collected from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to evaluate the flow of brain activity when religious and non-religious individuals discussed their religious beliefs. The authors determined causal pathways linking brain networks related to "supernatural agents," fear regulation, imagery, and affect, all of which may be involved in cognitive processing of religious beliefs.
"When the brain contemplates a religious belief," says Dr. Kapogiannis, "it is activating three distinct networks that are trying to answer three distinct questions: 1) is there a supernatural agent involved (such as God) and, if so, what are his or her intentions; 2) is the supernatural agent to be feared; and 3) how does this belief relate to prior life experiences and to doctrines?"
"Are there brain networks uniquely devoted to religious belief? Prior research has indicated the answer is a resolute no," continues study co-author Jordan Grafman, Director, Brain Injury Research and Chief, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. "But this study demonstrates that important brain networks devoted to various kinds of reasoning about others, emotional processing, knowledge representation, and memory are called into action when thinking about religious beliefs. The use of these basic networks for religious practice indicates how basic networks evolved to mediate much more complex beliefs like those contained in religious practice."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-brain-religious-beliefs.html#inlRlv
Study: Brain interactions differ between religious and non-religious subjects
(Medical Xpress)—An Auburn University researcher teamed up with the National Institutes of Health to study how brain networks shape an individual's religious belief, finding that brain interactions were different between religious and non-religious subjects.
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Gopikrishna Deshpande, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Auburn's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, and the NIH researchers recently published their results in the journal Brain Connectivity.
The group found differences in brain interactions that involved the theory of mind, or ToM, brain network, which underlies the ability to relate between one's personal beliefs, intents and desires with those of others. Individuals with stronger ToM activity were found to be more religious. Deshpande says this supports the hypothesis that development of ToM abilities in humans during evolution may have given rise to religion in human societies.
"Religious belief is a unique human attribute observed across different cultures in the world, even in those cultures which evolved independently, such as Mayans in Central America and aboriginals in Australia," said Deshpande, who is also a researcher at Auburn's Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center. "This has led scientists to speculate that there must be a biological basis for the evolution of religion in human societies."
Deshpande and the NIH scientists were following up a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to scan the brains of both self-declared religious and non-religious individuals as they contemplated three psychological dimensions of religious beliefs.
The fMRI – which allows researchers to infer specific brain regions and networks that become active when a person performs a certain mental or physical task – showed that different brain networks were activated by the three psychological dimensions; however, the amount of activation was not different in religious as compared to non-religious subjects.
To address this anomaly, Deshpande and NIH researchers characterized the interactions between the different brain networks that were activated during the study.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-brain-interactions-differ-religious-non-religious.html#inlRlv
The article above reminds me of this small study.
