{"id":353,"date":"2009-10-05T22:23:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-05T22:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/10\/brain-patterns-of-belief.html"},"modified":"2009-10-05T22:23:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-05T22:23:00","slug":"brain-patterns-of-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/10\/brain-patterns-of-belief.html","title":{"rendered":"Brain patterns of belief"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith<\/span>, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief.<\/p>\n

Harris and his colleagues were interested in two questions. Firstly, how does the brain process ideas of \u2018belief\u2019 and \u2018disbelief\u2019 \u2013 and does it differ when you are talking about religious beliefs or other kinds of beliefs.<\/p>\n

Secondly, which bits of the brain evaluate religious beliefs, and do they differ from the evaluation of non-religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

It was the usual neuroimaging deal: take some committed believers, and some committed non-believers, and fire some questions at them while scanning them. Broadly speaking, you put the subjects in two different mental states, and then subtract one from the other.<\/p>\n

The difference between the two is what shows up in the orange in the picture on the right. Those are the bits of the brain that are more active in one mental state relative to the other.<\/p>\n

What they found was that different bits of the brain light up when you evaluate a statement that you believe to be true compared with one that you believe to be false. And it really doesn\u2019t matter whether you are a believer or a non-believer, or whether the statement is a religious one or a non-religious one.<\/p>\n

What matters is whether you, personally, believe it to be true or false. In other words, there does seem to be anything special about religion here. A believer will evaluate a religious claim that \u201cThe God of the Bible is literally true\u201d in the same way that non-believer will evaluate the statement \u201cThe biblical god is a myth\u201d. And they will both evaluate these in the same way as the statement \u201cSanta Claus does not exist\u201d.<\/p>\n

But where the study did find a difference was for religious claims in general (whether or not they were believed to be true). That\u2019s what the image at the top of this post shows. It\u2019s the parts of the brains that light up when processing a religious claim, compared with a non-religious claim.<\/p>\n

So what does this prove? Well, part of the problem with these kinds of studies is that it doesn\u2019t show much. The brain\u2019s a complex, poorly understood organ, and each bit of the brain has been linked to several different functions.<\/p>\n

With that caveat, Harris reckons that evaluation of religious statements seem to be linked to emotions of disgust and pain:<\/p>\n

The contrast of religious stimuli minus nonreligious stimuli (see Fig. 2A, Table 3.) revealed greater signal in many regions, including the anterior insula and the ventral striatum. The anterior insula has been regularly linked to pain perception [34] and even to the perception of pain in others [35]. This region is also widely believed to mediate negatively valenced feelings like disgust [36], [37].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the other hand, non-religious statements are linked to regions of the brain connected with memory and semantic evaluation:<\/p>\n

The opposite contrast, nonreligious minus religious statements<\/i>, produced greater signal in left hemisphere networks, including the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, and retrosplenial cortex (see Fig. 2B<\/a>, Table 4<\/a>). It is well known that the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus are involved in memory retrieval [42]<\/a>. The anterior temporal lobe is also engaged by semantic memory tasks [43]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If that\u2019s the case, then it would seem to support the idea that non-religious claims are decided by a logical evaluation, whereas religious claims are decided according to whether they disgust you or not.<\/p>\n

And a last little titbit. There was also a difference in how quickly the subjects evaluated the statements. The quickest response times were for the non-believers when evaluating religious claims they agreed with (i.e. \u201cThe biblical god is a myth\u201d). In general, it\u2019s quicker to evaluate a \u2018true\u2019 statement than a false one. Could it be that \u2018Religion is false\u2019 is more true for nonbelievers that \u2018Religion is true\u2019 is for believers?<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"ResearchBlogging.org\"<\/a><\/span>
Harris S, Kaplan JT, Curiel A, Bookheimer SY, Iacoboni M, & Cohen MS (2009). The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief. PloS one, 4<\/span> (10) PMID: 19794914<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/span>This work by Tom Rees<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief. Harris and his colleagues were interested in two questions. Firstly, how does the brain process ideas of \u2018belief\u2019 and \u2018disbelief\u2019 \u2013 and does it differ when you are talking about religious beliefs or other kinds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBrain patterns of belief<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief.Harris and his colleagues were interested in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/10\/brain-patterns-of-belief.html\" \/>\n<meta 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