Despite the fact that religion is present in all cultures, and it is widely promoted around the world, scientists have yet to determine if religious belief is in any way different from normal cognition. While it is clear that the human brain reacts differently to religious or non-religious statements, the basic mechanisms underlying belief have been found to originate in exactly the same brain area, in a new study. In other words, there is no religious center of the brain. The same area that believes or disputes the statement “4 is an even number” lights up when the brain believes that “there is a God.”

The new experiments are among the first thorough, neuroimaging investigations to look at the differences between religious and normal beliefs. The research team, featuring scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC), also determined that the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions was judged with the same brain areas by devout Christians and non-believers alike. Details of the study appear in the September 30 issue of the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE.

“Despite vast differences in the underlying processing responsible for religious and nonreligious modes of thought, the distinction between believing and disbelieving a proposition appears to transcend content. These results may have many areas of application – ranging from the neuropsychology of religion, to the use of 'belief-detection' as a surrogate for 'lie-detection,' to understanding how the practice of science itself, and truth-claims generally, emerge from the biology of the human brain,” the authors write in their paper.

The research was led by Sam Harris, an expert at the UCLA Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, who has also been the lead author of the new study, and USC Brain and Creativity Institute Research Assistant Professor Jonas Kaplan, as the co-lead author. They determined that an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) played an important role in people believing or disbelieving statements.

“This region showed greater activity whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc., or statements about ordinary facts,” the authors say. The study was conducted using a technique known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which analyzes and reveals blood-flow patterns in the brain.