viernes, 9 de octubre de 2009

The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief

The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief
Sam Harris 1,7,10, Jonas T. Kaplan 2, Ashley Curiel 3, Susan Y. Bookheimer 4,5,6,7,9, Marco Iacoboni 1,4,6,7, Mark S. Cohen 5,6,7,8,9

1 UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
2 Brain and Creativity Institute and Department of Psychology, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
3 Department of Clinical Psychology, Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
4 Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
5 Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
6 Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
7 The Brain Research Institute, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
8 Departments of Neurology, Radiological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Biomedical Physics, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
9 Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, United States of America,
10 The Reason Project, Santa Monica, California, United States of America

Abstract
Background
While 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, and others have looked specifically at religious belief. 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 emotional associations, reward and goal-driven behavior. 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/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.

Source: PLoS One [Open Access]

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

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