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To The Brain, God Is Just Another Guy

March 9, 2009

The human brain, it appears, responds to God as if he were just another person, according to a team at the National Institutes of Health.

A study of 40 people — some religious, some nonreligious — found that phrases such as "I believe God is with me throughout the day and watches over me" lit up the same areas of the brain we use to decipher the emotions and intentions of other people.

"There was no difference," says Jordan Grafman, who runs the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Grafman says the finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that there is no special circuitry in the brain that deals with religious belief. It also suggests that religion developed as the human brain evolved its capacity for complex social interactions.

Grafman was part of a team that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 40 people as they read statements that either supported or challenged religious belief. Participants were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with statements such as, "God is angry at human behavior," or "There is no higher purpose."

The statements caused heightened activity in areas of the brain involved in empathy, and in deciphering what other people might be thinking. Scientists often refer to this ability as "theory of mind" or "theory of other minds." Humans are extremely good at it. Some other species, including great apes, appear to have a less advanced theory of mind.

When a person encounters a statement about God's presence, Grafman believes, "That's making an inference about God as a being of some kind, so you're making an inference about an entity and their relationship with you. That would activate the same areas in the brain as if you were making an inference about a friend's intentions."

Grafman says there were some differences between religious and nonreligious people.

Those who said they believed in God had a negative emotional response to statements like, "There is no higher purpose." Nonbelievers had the same reaction to statements that assumed God exists.

Grafman says the results show that, to the brain, religious belief is a lot like political belief.

"If you're very conservative and you have to make a judgment about what looks like a liberal statement and you disagree with that, you might find this very same brain system being activated," he says.

Grafman says the new study says nothing about whether God exists. But it does suggest that religious belief uses a brain system that evolved quite recently.

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