Beliefs, disbeliefs about God governed by same cerebral areas

WASHINGTON - When it comes to religion, believers and non-believers appear to think very differently. But such beliefs or disbeliefs about God are governed by the same cerebral areas, says a new study.

In the first neuro-imaging study, Universities of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Southern California (USC) researchers found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and non-religious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

The study also found that devout Christians and non-believers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and non-religious propositions. The results, the study authors say, represent a critical advance in the psychology of religion.

The study involved adults — half of them were committed Christians and half non-believers — who underwent three functional MRI (fMRI) scans while evaluating religious and non-religious statements as “true” or “false”.

The statements were designed to produce near perfect agreement between the two groups during non-religious trials (e.g. “Eagles really exist”) and near perfect disagreement during religious trials (e.g. “Angels really exist”).

Contrasting belief and disbelief yielded increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), an area of the brain thought to be involved in reward and in judgements of self-relevance, according to an UCLA release.

“This region showed greater activity whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc., or statements about ordinary facts,” the study authors said.

Sam Harris, who recently completed his doctoral dissertation in the lab of Mark Cohen, professor of psychiatry at the UCLA, led the study. Jonas Kaplan, a research assistant professor at the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, was study co-author.

The study appeared in PLoS One.