The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief - PubMed (original) (raw)

The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief

Sam Harris et al. PLoS One. 2009.

Abstract

Background: While 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 findings: We 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/significance: While 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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1. Belief minus disbelief (Both Categories; Both Groups).

Greater signal for belief compared with disbelief appeared in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, lateral occipital cortex, and superior frontal gyrus. The bottom panel shows percent signal change from baseline in each of the clusters (vmpc = ventromedial prefrontal cortex; log = lateral occipital gyrus; sfg = superior frontal gyrus). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Figure 2. Religious versus nonreligious statements.

(A) The MRI signal was greater when subjects evaluated religious statements compared with nonreligious statements in areas throughout the brain, including the precuneus, anterior cingulate, insula, and ventral striatum. (B) Increased signal was found for nonreligious statements compared with religious statements in several left hemisphere regions including the parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortex, temporal pole, middle temporal gyrus and hippocampus.

Figure 3. Reponses to blasphemy in both groups.

There were significant differences between blasphemous and non-blasphemous statements in both groups. These are regions that show greater signal both when Christians reject stimuli contrary to their doctrine (e.g. “The Biblical god is a myth”) and when nonbelievers affirm their belief in those same statements (pc = paracingulate gyrus; mf = middle frontal gyrus; vs = ventral striatum; ip = inferior parietal lobe; fp = frontal pole). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

References

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The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief - PubMed (original) (raw)