There is one question: What about non-religious people?
How do these findings explain actual Atheists, or, maybe more germane,
what does it say about those who are disinterested in religion?
There's also a corollary: Not everyone is as religious. Some people
are true believers and others are not, and there seem to be degrees
of commitment. Is there some kind of overall theory to account
for these kinds of differences?
Anyway, a fascinating study.
BR
The neuroscience argument that religion shaped the very structure of our
brains
Olivia Goldhill ("Quartz," December 3, 2016)
Religion and neuroscience are not an obvious pairing. But earlier this
week, a study published in Social Neuroscience demonstrated that spiritual
feelings activate the neurological reward systems of devout Mormons. The study
used fMRI scans to show that the nucleus accumbens—an area associated with
reward—is activated when Mormons who have a strong sense of spirituality
carry out religious activities. The same area can also be activated by love,
sex, drugs, and music.
In this particular paper, the study, with a sample size of just 19, has
serious limitations. But it’s part of a young and fast-growing new field that
examines the relationship between our brains and religion, called
neurotheology.
Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and neurology professor at Northwestern
University, says that neurotheology is important in part because early
religious
practices helped develop our brains to begin with. “Religion has played an
incredibly important role in human evolution. It’s funny, people want to
separate the two but in fact they’re intertwined,” he says.
Of course, it’s a two-way relationship between the brain and religion. Our
brains had to develop the capacity to establish social communities and
behaviors, which are the basis of religious societies. But religious practice
in turn developed the brain, says Grafman. “As these societies became more
co-operative, our brains evolved in response to that. Our brain led to
behavior and then the behavior fed back to our brain to help sculpt it,” he
adds.
For example, frontal lobes are necessary to future planning and
controlling compulsive behavior, and therefore to the social arrangements
within
organized religion. But consistently practicing religious social behaviors
likely strengthened those areas of the brain: “If we end up using more of one
region, it will try to take up greater shape. It will expand a little bit.
That’s no doubt what happened to the frontal lobes,” says Grafman.
But there’s no part of the brain, nor neurological response, that’s
distinctly religious. Andrew Newberg, a neurotheologian and professor of
emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University was one of the
first to study the connection between neurology and religion, in the 1990s.
Back then, his work was highly unusual, but he says the field has grown
massively in the past 10 to 15 years. Newberg’s work has identified key
neurological responses to spiritual experience, but he points out that the
field “
is about understanding ourselves as human beings,” not simply in connection
with religion.
“No specific part of the brain is the religious self,” he says. “Many
parts of the brain are part of our religious and spiritual practices. I think
that makes sense because religious beliefs involves our thoughts, actions,
and behaviors.”
Studies suggest that the reward system activated in the Mormon study would
also be activated whenever subject experience an equivalent secular
experience: for example, when a subject reads an opinion—whether it’s
political,
scientific, legal, or any other field—with which they strongly agree. “We’
ve seen it with political beliefs, donating to charities they believed in—
after all, that’s why we repeat our behaviors,” says Grafman.
“What makes religious studies interesting is they’re uniquely human
traits and belief systems. If you do find a set of brain areas that are active
during a religious task, by reverse inference you can make a judgment about
what cognitive processes—social or emotional—underlie that particular
activation that’s there in the religious task,” he says. If you ask people to
think about God, for example, the brain areas that activate turn out to be
the same as brain areas activated in empathetic tasks, like imagining a
situation from someone else’s perspective.
Some academics resist certain neurotheology practices, arguing that
religion is far too nuanced and subtle an experience to study using brain
scans.
Evan Thompson, philosophy of mind professor at the University of British
Columbia, says that studies such as the recent Mormon paper are simply too
blunt. “The brain has to be understood as a complex series of networks in
which the meaning of anything going on in it is always dependent on the
context,” he says. “When we study the brain, we’re interested in how it
enables
human cognition generally. And if we want to understand religion, we need
something like anthropology.”
Some work in neurotheology does work to incorporate anthropology, and
researchers say that neuroscience is, at the very least, a crucial area of
study within the larger conversation around understanding religion. “There’s
the argument that religion has benefited human beings by helping to create
cohesive societies and morals and help us to determine our behavior and
interact with the world more effectively,” says Newberg. “The ability to think
about this from a neuroscience perspective is part of that discussion.”
As Grafman points out, the history of every human society involves
religion. “There’s nobody who’d say it’s not important,” he says. “It’s just
been understudied from a neuroscience point of view.
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