num_pages: 9
description: ABSTRACT from the full study:BackgroundWhile 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 FindingsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjectsfifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelieversas 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/SignificanceWhile 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.Author ContributionsConceived and designed the experiments: Sam Harris Jonas T. Kaplan Marco Iacoboni Mark S. Cohen. Performed the experiments: Jonas T. Kaplan. Analyzed the data: Sam Harris Jonas T. Kaplan Marco Iacoboni Mark S. Cohen. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: Marco Iacoboni Mark S. Cohen. Wrote the paper: Sam Harris Jonas T. Kaplan. Performed all subject recruitment telephone screenings and psychometric assessments prior to scanning: Ashley Curiel. Supervised our psychological assessment procedures and consulted on subject exclusions: Susan Y. Bookheimer. Gave extensive notes on the manuscript: Mark S. Cohen Marco Iacoboni.
language: English
title: The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief
publisher: Public Library of Science