Day 45: This is your brain on God
Compared with the brain's normal state (left), brain scans by Andrew Newberg of a buddhist in meditation (right) show decreased activity in the parietal lobes, which are involved with our perception of our physical and temporal distinction.
Science will never be able to study God. But scientists are getting ever closer to describing what happens in our brains when we think about God.
The idea to peek inside the brains of religious folks is not new, and it started the way many other brain studies did: by looking at brain damage. Starting in the 1980s, researchers began to notice hyperreligiosity in patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy. Popular interpretation said the temporal lobe contained a “God spot” — which stoked ongoing animosity between staunch religionists and ardent scientists.
“On Internet discussion groups, atheists crowed that religion had been proven to be nothing more than a dysfunction of the brain,” wrote one author in a Christian magazine. “Some theists countered, equally glibly, that God had designed our brains to be receptive to the divine; consequently, atheists seemed to be missing a vital piece of equipment.”
Since the advent of functional imaging studies, researchers have been able to study the brains of healthy people when they pray, meditate or — as in a new study released this week — hear religious statements.
(blog post continues below)
Great TIME graphic based on the work of Gregg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School. Click on the picture to visit an interactive version; requires Flash.
The authors of the new study, led by Dimitrios Kapogiannis at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, combined psychological testing with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracked blood flow in the study subjects’ brains as they evaluated statements about religious beliefs.
Here is a partial list of the statements spoken to the subjects, while their brains were monitored for the study: God is removed from the world; life has no higher purpose; God’s will guides my acts; God is punishing; God is forgiving; God is ever-present; religion is directly involved in worldly affairs.
The researchers are now proposing that there’s no one “God spot,” but that religious feeling reaches into a variety of aspects of the ways our brains work.
Statements about a lack of God’s involvement in the world triggered activity (e.g. higher blood flow) in a variety of brain regions associated with the control of negative emotions, for example. Statements about God’s anger engaged parts of the brain involved in detection of highly charged emotion in facial expression and linguistic content.
“On the other hand, statements reflecting God’s love activated … an area involved in positive emotional states and suppression of sadness,” the authors wrote, adding that activation of that particular region (called the RMFG) might explain how positive God concepts reduce depression.
Based on their findings, the authors of the new study suggest that religious capacity evolved not in isolation, but along with brain functions that have helped humans to succeed over time.
“The evolution of these networks was likely driven by their primary roles in social cognition, language, and logical reasoning,” they wrote. “Religious cognition likely emerged as a unique combination of these several evolutionarily important cognitive processes.”
Although the study focused on Western people, the authors suggest that tribal and non-Western religions might involve different patterns of brain activity.
A great idea for future research, I think. I also think it would be fascinating to put together a comparative study peeking at the brains of atheists, strict religious adherents and people in between — like garden-variety theists, or agnostics. But this new study is certainly a good start.
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2 Responses to “Day 45: This is your brain on God”
Raima on March 11th, 2009 9:21 am
Great post, Anne. I have heard about this research and you’ve done a nice job summarizing the findings. I wonder if anybody has looked at the historical significance of epilepsy in religious experience? A striking example is that of Karen Armstrong, a leading scholar in religious studies. (She wrote “A History of God,” among other things.) In her autobiography, “Through the Narrow Gate,” she talks about her experiences as a young nun which were marked by frequent epileptic seizures, often coming on during prayer.
Robert Westafer on April 17th, 2009 2:28 am
Brain Identity
Suppose we have all been misled by language invented by our predecessors and the simple truth turns out to be that we are not “human beings” or “persons” but rather human brains that are intimately connected to all the organs and other parts of the particular human body in which we reside.
What if the word “person” and the “personal pronouns” we commonly use such as “I”, “me”, “we”, “you”, etc. are only linguistic inventions of human brains that for one reason or another were unable to identify themselves correctly as actually being human brains?
It can be shown that a human brain has the ability to create and use spoken and written language through the use of certain areas of cerebral cortex located usually its left hemisphere. Strokes or other damage in these areas cause impairment or loss of a human brain’s ability to produce and understand spoken and written language. Precisely which linguistic abilities are impaired or lost in any given instance and to what degree depends upon the exact location and extent of the brain damage.
We know that every human brain and body has been built from a new combination of parental DNA that resulted from the union of a particular egg and a particular sperm which formed a single new cell; and over about a nine month period the information stored in the DNA inside that first new cell allowed it to divide and grow into trillions of new cells of various types, all of which were organized into the complexity of nature that in our linguistic simplicity we refer to as a newborn baby.
We also know that having been built by DNA, each brain and body – beginning even during the building process and continuing ever after – has been continually modified by an enormous amount of environmental variables and experience, up to and including the present moment.
Suppose for the sake of argument that I actually am a human brain that is continuous with a spinal cord and connected through nerves to all the organs and other parts of the body in which I reside. Such an identity for oneself may take a bit of time getting used to. But if that is my true identity, does that fact automatically mean that it is impossible for anything else to exist that is not made of atoms and molecules like I am? Or is it possible that something might exist that may be many orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than I am? Is it possible that something might exist that is in some way related to the awesome complexity of nature that is evident in the cosmos and can be seen throughout the living world on our planet and of which I am a part? Is that something that human brains might choose to call a “Supernatural Power”, or perhaps “God”?
I am thrilled to be able to understand the basics of what I am and how I came into existence. But having such an understanding does not somehow automatically enlighten me as to the nature of everything else that may or may not exist.
If I am only linguistically a “human being” or a “person” – a fictional entity invented by my predecessors that does not exist except in language, and that can be theoretically thought of as perhaps “owning” a brain and a body – but in reality I am actually a particular human brain that has been built by my DNA and modified by a ton of experience and that is intimately connected to and living within a particular human body, my body, then the brain inside my head – the brain that thinks precisely what I think, feels exactly what I feel, remembers everything that I remember, knows what I know, and has experienced everything that I have experienced – that brain located behind my forehead and inside my skull cannot be called “my brain”, as if I am somehow a separate entity that “owns” that brain, because that brain is, in fact, “me”.