14 DAY TRIAL // A collaboration of researchers from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago has recently conducted a new study of the human brain, which revealed that generalized religious beliefs tend to evoke a set of cognitive abilities that can be traced back to specific areas of the human brain.
Furthermore, the team established that differences in religious thoughts and attitudes can lead to more causal, directional connections forming between these particular brain regions. These conclusions are in tune with emerging neuroscientific research focused on analyzing the neural flow of information, PsychCentral reports.
“When the brain contemplates a religious belief it is activating three distinct networks that are trying to answer three distinct questions,” comments researcher Dimitrios Kapogiannis, MD, the leader of the study. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for this investigation.
Details of their work appear in a paper titled Brain Networks Shaping Religious Beliefs, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Brain Connectivity. “The use of these basic networks for religious practice indicates how basic networks evolved to mediate much more complex beliefs like those contained in religious practice,” Kapogiannis concludes.