The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief

Near-Death-Like Experiences without Life-Threatening Conditions or Brain Disorders: A Hypothesis from a Case Report

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are profound psychic experiences commonly occurring in life-threatening conditions. They include feeling a sense of peace, of seeing a bright light, encountering deceased relatives or religious figures, and of transcending space and time. To explain them, it has been suggested that they stem from brain disorders and/or psychological reactions to approaching death, a sort of wishful thinking in response to the perceived threat. This is a report on a case with most of the features typical of NDEs except that it occurred entirely without any life-threatening conditions. This evidence is theoretically incompatible with either of the above hypotheses, suggesting that a broader interpretation of the phenomenon is needed.

Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and the human prefrontal cortex

OBJECTIVE

The psychological processes of doubting and skepticism have recently become topics of neuroscientific investigation. In this context, we developed the False Tagging Theory, a neurobiological model of the belief and doubt process, which proposes that the prefrontal cortex is critical for normative doubt regarding properly comprehended cognitive representations. Here, we put our theory to an empirical test, hypothesizing that patients with prefrontal cortex damage would have a doubt deficit that would manifest as higher authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism.

METHOD

Ten patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), 10 patients with damage to areas outside the vmPFC, and 16 medical comparison patients, who experienced life-threatening (but non-neurological) medical events, completed a series of scales measuring authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and specific religious beliefs.

RESULTS

vmPFC patients reported significantly higher authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism than the other groups. The degrees of authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism in the vmPFC group were significantly higher than normative values, as well; by contrast, the comparison groups did not differ from normative values. Moreover, vmPFC patients reported increased specific religious beliefs after brain injury.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings support the False Tagging Theory and suggest that the vmPFC is critical for psychological doubt and resistance to authoritarian persuasion.

Materialism

Materialism is nearly universally assumed by cognitive scientists. Intuitively, materialism says that a person's mental states are nothing over and above his or her material states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have introduced concepts (e.g., realization and supervenience) to assist in formulating the theses of materialism and dualism with more precision, and distinguished among importantly different versions of each view (e.g., eliminative materialism, substance dualism, and emergentism). They have also clarified the logic of arguments that use empirical findings to support materialism. Finally, they have devised various objections to materialism, objections that therefore serve also as arguments for dualism. These objections typically center around two features of mental states that materialism has had trouble in accommodating. The first feature is intentionality, the property of representing, or being about, objects, properties, and states of affairs external to the mental states. The second feature is phenomenal consciousness, the property possessed by many mental states of there being something it is like for the subject of the mental state to be in that mental state. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:281-292. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1174 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

The sacred and the absurd--an electrophysiological study of counterintuitive ideas (at sentence level)

Religious beliefs are both catchy and durable: they exhibit a high degree of adherence to our cognitive system, given their success of transmission and spreading throughout history. A prominent explanation for religion's cultural success comes from the "MCI hypothesis," according to which religious beliefs are both easy to recall and desirable to transmit because they are minimally counterintuitive (MCI). This hypothesis has been empirically tested at concept and narrative levels by recall measures. However, the neural correlates of MCI concepts remain poorly understood. We used the N400 component of the event-related brain potential as a measure of counterintuitiveness of violations comparing religious and non-religious sentences, both counterintuitive, when presented in isolation. Around 80% in either condition were core-knowledge violations. We found smaller N400 amplitudes for religious as compared to non-religious counterintuitive ideas, suggesting that religious ideas are less semantically anomalous. Moreover, behavioral measures revealed that religious ideas are not readily detected as unacceptable. Finally, systematic analyses of our materials, according to conceptual features proposed in cognitive models of religion, did not reveal any outstanding variable significantly contributing to these differences. Refinements of cognitive models of religion should elucidate which combination of factors renders an anomaly less counterintuitive and thus more suitable for recall and transmission.

Associations of religious behavior and experiences with extent of regional atrophy in the orbitofrontal cortex during older adulthood

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a region of the brain that has been empirically linked with religious or spiritual activity, and atrophy in this region has been shown to contribute to serious mental illness in late life. This study used structural magnetic resonance imaging to examine the association between religious or spiritual factors and volume of the orbitalfrontal cortex (OFC). Change in the volume of participants' left and right OFC was measured longitudinally over a period of two to eight years. Multiple linear regression analyses showed that religious or spiritual factors were related to extent of atrophy in the left OFC. Significantly less atrophy of the left OFC was observed in participants who reported a life-changing religious or spiritual experience during the course of the study, and in members of Protestant religious groups who reported being born-again when entering the study. Significantly greater atrophy of the left OFC was also associated with more frequent participation in public religious worship. No significant relationship was observed between religious or spiritual factors and extent of atrophy in the right OFC. These results support the presence of a long-term relationship between religious or spiritual experience and brain structure, which may have clinical implications.

Naturalizing aesthetics: brain areas for aesthetic appraisal across sensory modalities

We present here the most comprehensive analysis to date of neuroaesthetic processing by reporting the results of voxel-based meta-analyses of 93 neuroimaging studies of positive-valence aesthetic appraisal across four sensory modalities. The results demonstrate that the most concordant area of activation across all four modalities is the right anterior insula, an area typically associated with visceral perception, especially of negative valence (disgust, pain, etc.). We argue that aesthetic processing is, at its core, the appraisal of the valence of perceived objects. This appraisal is in no way limited to artworks but is instead applicable to all types of perceived objects. Therefore, one way to naturalize aesthetics is to argue that such a system evolved first for the appraisal of objects of survival advantage, such as food sources, and was later co-opted in humans for the experience of artworks for the satisfaction of social needs.

The neurobiological link between compassion and love

Love and compassion exert pleasant feelings and rewarding effects. Besides their emotional role and capacity to govern behavior, appetitive motivation, and a general ‘positive state’, even ‘spiritual’ at times, the behaviors shown in love and compassion clearly rely on neurobiological mechanisms and underlying molecular principles. These processes and pathways involve the brain’s limbic motivation and reward circuits, that is, a finely tuned and profound autoregulation. This capacity to self-regulate emotions, approach behaviors and even pair bonding, as well as social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival and overall health. Yet, molecular biology is the basis of interpersonal neurobiology, however, there is no answer to the question of what comes first or is more important: It is a cybernetic capacity and complex circuit of autoregulation that is clearly ‘amazing’.

Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life

Despite a growing interest in the ways spiritual beliefs and practices are reflected in brain activity, there have been relatively few studies using neuroimaging data to assess potential relationships between religious factors and structural neuroanatomy. This study examined prospective relationships between religious factors and hippocampal volume change using high-resolution MRI data of a sample of 268 older adults. Religious factors assessed included life-changing religious experiences, spiritual practices, and religious group membership. Hippocampal volumes were analyzed using the GRID program, which is based on a manual point-counting method and allows for semi-automated determination of region of interest volumes. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.

Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being

BACKGROUND: How is happiness generated via brain function in lucky individuals who have the good fortune to be happy? Conceptually, well-being or happiness has long been viewed as requiring at least two crucial ingredients: positive affect or pleasure (hedonia) and a sense of meaningfulness or engagement in life (eudaimonia). Science has recently made progress in relating hedonic pleasure to brain function, and so here we survey new insights into how brains generate the hedonic ingredient of sustained or frequent pleasure. We also briefly discuss how brains might connect hedonia states of pleasure to eudaimonia assessments of meaningfulness, and so create balanced states of positive well-being. RESULTS: Notable progress has been made in understanding brain bases of hedonic processing, producing insights into that brain systems that cause and/or code sensory pleasures. Progress has been facilitated by the recognition that hedonic brain mechanisms are largely shared between humans and other mammals, allowing application of conclusions from animal studies to a better understanding of human pleasures. In the past few years, evidence has also grown to indicate that for humans, brain mechanisms of higher abstract pleasures strongly overlap with more basic sensory pleasures. This overlap may provide a window into underlying brain circuitry that generates all pleasures, including even the hedonic quality of pervasive well-being that detaches from any particular sensation to apply to daily life in a more sustained or frequent fashion. CONCLUSIONS: Hedonic insights are applied to understanding human well-being here. Our strategy combines new findings on brain mediators that generate the pleasure of sensations with evidence that human brains use many of the same hedonic circuits from sensory pleasures to create the higher pleasures. This in turn may be linked to how hedonic systems interact with other brain systems relevant to self-understanding and the meaning components of eudaimonic happiness. Finally, we speculate a bit about how brains that generate hedonia states might link to eudaimonia assessments to create properly balanced states of positive well-being that approach true happiness.