Gopikrishna Deshpande, researcher at Auburn University’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are investigating how brain networks shape religious beliefs, and have found that brain interactions are different among religious and non-religious subjects.
The group has discovered differences in brain interactions that involve the theory of mind, or ToM, brain network, which influences people’s ability to differentiate between their own personal beliefs, intents and desires and those of others. Individuals with stronger ToM activity were found to be more religious. Deshpande notes that this supports the hypothesis that the formation of religious beliefs in humans may be attributed to the development of the ToM brain network.
“Religious belief is a unique human attribute observed across different cultures in the world, even in those cultures which evolved independently, such as Mayans in Central America and aboriginals in Australia,” he said. “This has led scientists to speculate that there must be a biological basis for the evolution of religion in human societies.”
Deshpande and the NIH researchers recently published their results in the journal “Brain Connectivity.” The team was following up a study reported in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to scan the brains of both self-declared religious and non-religious individuals as they contemplated three psychological dimensions of religious beliefs: the involvement and intent of supernatural agents, such as God; the love and anger of those supernatural agents; and the mixed foundation of religious beliefs based on doctrinal and experiential knowledge.
The fMRI allows researchers to study specific brain regions and networks that become active when a person performs a certain mental or physical task. The team found that although the amount of activation in different brain networks did not vary among religious and non-religious subjects when contemplating the three dimensions, there was a difference in the actual brain networks that were activated by the dimensions. Through the use of this technology, Auburn researchers are gaining a better understanding of the human mind and the ways in which we form our belief systems.
