Enter Your Email Address to Receive a
Copy of MedicExhange Member Demograhpics

A team of U.S. researchers has obtained firm evidence that religiosity is managed by the same parts of the brain that are used every day to interpret other people's moods and intentions and to analyze experiences. The study showed that religion taps into existing parts of the brain that evolved to handle complex social interactions.

The team of Doctors studying questioned volunteers about their 'religious beliefs' while monitoring the blood flow in their brains with a scanning machine. Extra blood flow is assumed to reflect the activity of neurons in a specific region of the brain. Different networks of neurons sprang into action when subjects were asked their view of statements about their religious beliefs.

The neural activity in the subjects’ brains corresponded to brain networks known to have other, nonreligious functions; which include the theory of mind networks, used to predict other people’s intentions.

For these conclusions, believers and atheists alike were questioned during an experiment, over the course of which their brains were hooked to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines. The effect that various God-related statements produced on their minds were carefully recorded, and then analyzed and cross-referenced to their triggers.

Results

According to the results of the brain scans, participants showed that they used more of their higher thought patterns when dealing with concepts associated with a higher being, such as the role of God in their lives, the attributes of the Creator, as well as when trying to decipher metaphors hidden behind religious teachings.

For each attribute that was assigned to God, a different part of the brain “lit up” on the fMRI scans, further proving that there was no religious spot in the brain and that the entire cortex participated in the belief process.

“That suggests that religion is not a special case of a belief system, but evolved along with other belief and social cognitive abilities,” National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke cognitive neuroscientist Jordan Grafman, who works out of Bethesda, Maryland, told LiveScience.

For the first part of the study, the scientists set out to determine what people believed of God's involvement and intentions for the world, and sought to analyze personal experiences that each of the participants claimed to have had, rather than rely on religious doctrine alone. For the second part of the experiment, the participants were asked to respond to statements regarding the beliefs they expressed, and the reactions of their brains were recorded with the fMRI machine.

Conclusion

Brain researchers concluded that the brain depends on general networks that exist for other purposes, as opposed to a 'special region' or network for this task. Thus, the researchers learned that individuals tended to use their higher-function brain regions while attempting to sort their ideas of God and when handling concepts related to this idea.

Parts of the brain linked to the theory of mind (ToM) failed to work properly when they tried to analyze the actions of a God involved with the world. On the other hand, it lit up significantly when participants sought to understand the actions of a detached higher being.
The researchers inferred that religious cohesion for a common purpose, besides the ability to infer what others are thinking, would each have been favored by evolution, along with the theory of mind networks that serves both systems. They further inferred that the networks activated by religious beliefs overlap with those that mediate political beliefs and moral beliefs

According to researchers, these studies were another good approach to studying the concept of religion. But conversely, there were doubts as to whether the biological correlates of religious belief, as visualized in brain scans in fact captured all of what religion is.

Source: news.Softpedia/NYT