Yes, but…

Yes, that’s where this stuff happens in the brain, but that doesn’t mean … it is caused there.

From PS by Nate and Sam Kornell:

That’s the headline the Huffington Post ran with after a team of neuroscientists discovered that profound religious and spiritual experiences light up discrete portions of the brain. That the media termed these chunks of mystical gray matter the “God Spot” was both clever and predictable; thus reduced, the research became instantly famous and immediately controversial: People didn’t want to see their deepest beliefs reduced to a simple biological explanation.

Neuroscientists are now able to use sophisticated technology to peer into the skull and study the brain in unprecedented ways, and the boom in neuroscience research over the past decade has captured the public’s imagination. But some scientists are worried that the public’s imagination, fueled by simplistic media reporting, has run away with itself.

In a newly published article in the journal of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Diane Beck, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, argues that the allure of many neuroscience studies is that they can be made to offer “deceptively simple messages” about human behavior. She also says that their popularity is partly based on a “sometimes misguided confidence in biological data.”

Articles trumpeting new neuroscience research have become a reliably popular subject for newspapers and magazines. They might be called There’s a brain area for that?! stories. Typically, a headline will advertise, implicitly or explicitly, an “objective” new explanation for some common form of human behavior. Underneath the headline, however, the startling information the reader has been promised turns out to be not so startling. We “commonly see statements such as ‘Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain,’’’ Beck writes. “Do people really doubt that chocoholics love chocolate? … This is probably something most people already believe without the need for a corroborating brain scan.”

Likewise, that spiritual feelings can be localized to specific parts of the brain is important to neuroscientists. But how important is it to you? Put another way, is it really surprising that religious and spiritual feelings occur in the brain? It shouldn’t be: If it was the spirit that moved you, the spirit can still do it in a way that affects your brain.

There’s a brain area for that?! stories can also be misleading, either because of flaky science or careless reporting, or both.