Sam Harris, et al - The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief

Figure 2. Religious versus nonreligious statements.

Most of those who follow Sam Harris at all (you know who you are) also know that he completed his PhD in neuroscience a while back. I've seen his name on a couple of studies over the years, but this is the first time I have seen him as the lead author - and it's open access too. How cool is that?

It's notable that Marco Iacoboni is also on this study (both he and Harris are at UCLA) - he is one of the main guys in mirror neuron research (among other things).

This comes from PLoS ONE (go to the article to get that author affiliations). Here is the citation:

Harris, S., Kaplan, J.T., Curiel, A., Bookheimer, S.Y., Iacoboni, M., et al. (2009) The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief. PLoS ONE; 4(10): e7272. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272

Abstract

Background

1While 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 Findings

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as 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. 1A 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/Significance

While 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.

You can read the whole article online or download the PDF. I'm sure I've said this before, but open access rocks.

I find it most interesting that belief in the truth of religious propositions or belief in the falsity of religious propositions both lit up the same areas of the brain - this proves a point many of us have been trying to make about the new atheist position: belief is belief, belief in atheism is little different than belief in theism.

Tags: Psychology, Religion, brain, belief, research, Sam Harris, Marco Iacoboni, PLoS ONE, open access, The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, neuroscience, UCLA, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, self-representation, emotional associations, reward, goal-driven behavior