Is there a difference between the brain of an atheist andthe brain of a religious person?
—Emma Schachner, Utah
Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds:
Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet complete.
Several studies have revealed that people who practice meditation or have prayed for many years exhibit increased activity and have more brain tissue in their frontal lobes, regions associated with attention and reward, as compared with people who do not meditate or pray. A more recent study revealed that people who have had “born again” experiences have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in emotions and memory, than atheists do. These findings, however, are difficult to interpret because they do not clarify whether having larger frontal lobes or a smaller hippocampus causes a person to become more religious or whether being pious triggers changes in these brain regions.
Various experiments have also tried to elucidate whether believing in God causes similar brain changes as believing in something else. The results, so far, show that thinking about God may activate the same parts of the brain as thinking about an airplane, a friend or a lamppost. For instance, one study showed that when religious people prayed to God, they used some of the same areas of the brain as when they talked to an average Joe. In other words, in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person.
Research also suggests that a religious brain exhibits higher levels of dopamine, a hormone associated with increased attention and motivation. A study showed that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see words and faces on a screen when there were none, whereas skeptics often did not see words and faces that were actually there. Yet when skeptics were given the drug L-dopa, which increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, they were just as likely to interpret scrambled patterns as words and faces as were the religious individuals.
So what does the research mean? At the moment, we do not have a clear way to connect all the dots. For now we can say that the religious and atheist brains exhibit differences, but what causes these disparities remains unknown.
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Add Commentit means that brains of atheists use what they have more effective than their "believing" counterparts!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Research also suggests that a religious brain exhibits higher levels of dopamine"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, I guess Karl Marx was right when he called religion "the opiate of the masses". God is a drug - just say "No!"
This quote seems problematic: " in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes the brain segment itself to function to divide real from unreal and believed from disbelieved, accepted tentatively or not, from fervently committed to, or not? Does it matter what kind of god one believes in? Is this a brain-geographic matter?
Evidence, please. Not surmise, or misdrawn conclusions.
The brain of an atheist might have inherited the talent to revere God (natural law) more. I believe Jesus was a determinist, egalitarian and utopian ideologist, and today he might even be called an unpatriotic atheist. Try substituting the words ‘cause and effect’ or ‘natural law’ for God the next time you read the gospels, and you might see what I mean.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich group makes more overreaching interpretations of neurotransmitter levels and brain scan readings? Some of the claims in this article are a little over the top.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissonaran, if there is no god, then ultimately our existence is meaningless, but in order to survive psychologically, we subjectively apply meaning to our lives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the researchers are subjectively applying meaning to neurotransmitter levels and brain scan readings.
I fervently believe in Gödel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAwesome
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou mean Godel, with a diaeresis (blimey) above the "o", don't you?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes.
Talking to myself again.
Two more cents: Is it really a matter of doctrines, e.g. theism of some kind or atheism (or for that matter agnosticism or racism)? Or is it the manner in which such beliefs are held. I would bet that there is an interesting distinction to be found in brains between "true believers," e.g. dogmatic adherents, of any kind and those who are more tentative in their commitments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, where do Superman or Mr. Pickwick or phlogiston or Johnny Appleseed or subatomic strings fit in? Can we look for stimulated brain cells in a particular location to determine for us whether they are real or imaginary? Or are we talking about what the subject believes?
Several authors have made the case for the existence of a "religious organ" in the brain. If that is ever found, the resolution of life's ambiguities in faith, as evidenced by the increase in endorphins, shows that such an organ is indeed effective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf it works, the question of whether or not there is a God or a soul becomes epistemology. Many will argue that existence is meaningless, others will simply go on living with alternate meanings.
I once worked for a guy at a public agency who had an excellent reputation and was well liked by his managerial peers and higher up bosses. He once told me his theory was be nice to those people you want something from and treat the rest as ordinary. He was also the sort who routinely took sole credit for the accomplishments of the people in his Dept. He attended church regularly. That is his pubic profile.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut there was another side to him that others weren't aware of. He actively disliked disabled people, especially mentally challenged ( Downs syndrome) ones, and we had some working in our building, but not our Dept.
Early every morning maintenance people came through our building and unlocked doors and turned on lights in hallways and restrooms. At one end of our building near some restrooms was a recycle center where the Downs syndrome people worked. Each morning they were dropped off outside the entrance to the building and restrooms which they then entered and congregated in till another supervisor came and took them to their work area.
Frequently after the maintenance people had unlocked the entrance doors and turned on the hall lights and left the building, my boss would then turn off those lights and re-lock the doors, preventing the Downs syndrome people from entering the building. He did this rain or shine but especially during rain and early morning winter darkness. Of course the Downs people could not enter and on occasion were left standing outside in the cold and rain, rather helpless and confused.
On one occasion my boss laughingly told me about what he had been doing for some time. I was horrified but said nothing to him or anyone else. To this day i do not think anyone would have believed me since my boss was so well liked. Mia Culpa. But afterwards I did make sure that when I arrived the lights were on and doors unlocked, but still I said nothing.
For this reason alone I hope there is a God.
public...public....public......damnn i hate editting!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"if there is no god, then ultimately our existence is meaningless"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think you're getting mixed up between the word "our" and the word "my".
Aren't the frontal lobes also associated with "self-awareness" and are fundamental to the human capacity for episodic memory allowing us to be, well aware we're alive and question everything around us versus, say a monkey or another less evolved animal? So, if this is the case, then religious belief or choosing to believe in God an evolutionary trait for the *more evolved* than just think "see banana, eat banana" ? :P
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRandom question for you science gurus, regarding the shroud of turin and that carbon tests dated it to a thousand years A.C.....if a fabric is exposed to intense radiation or gamma rays, whatnot, is there a chance the carbon testing will be skewed a millennium or so? Just wondering...(when they carbon tested to see if Vatican's Jesus cloth is well in fact that of an earlier time frame)....not that I believe, unless that somehow skews the testing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I believe Jesus was a determinist, egalitarian and utopian ideologist, and today he might even be called an unpatriotic atheist."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Believe" is the key word here, since other than a handful of late interpolations, there is absolutely no evidence available to corroborate the Jesus "the Christ" was an actual historical figure. The flesh and blood Jesus we "know" today was painted in the official and unofficial gospels decades and centuries after his supposed lifetime.
While the centuries during which Christianity arose were rife with real messianic personalities, the Jesus of the gospels most likely never existed.
Early "Christian" beliefs were probably gnostic in nature, and the physical nature of "Christ" was introduced only later, when the politics of the nascent church demanded "authority" which derived from a flesh and blood "Jesus."
I don't have a lot of time to provide links but studies in to the 'Uncanny Valley" will provide some research into the brains ability to know "real" from "fake" in the area of speech synthesis or animation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are very good at detecting phony types of speech, not very good at detecting phony statements though, it will be interesting to see the studies unfold as to why we are so efficient in some areas of thinking and so prone to delusion in the other.
Another area might be to look into areas on Subjective Well Being that describes the state of bounded rationality that we exist within and why we can sometimes be religious and others not so much.
There are quite a few of us that believe that no God equates to a meaningless life, in fact it is more to the contrary if one considers that actions that are based on a promise of some future reward that has never been seen or proven then those actions are wasted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTake the same passion, come down off the cross and use that wood to help a homeless person build shelter, isn't that more meaningful?
Perhaps it might be better to say that the objective reality or non-reality of god doesn't matter when it comes to mapping neurological activity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeems to me you're assuming there is a god. Take the opposite tack for the moment and assume there isn't. Your statement, "...in order to survive psychologically, we subjectively apply meaning to our lives" is a reasonable way to account for the existence of any sort of religion. Assuming that mere humans wrote the Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, etc. (which makes much more sense to me than assuming an omnipotent and omniscient creator would be so crummy at communicating clearly and consistently information upon which the fate of human life supposedly depends), just goes to show how creative we can be in inventing meaning. So the 'necessity' you describe of having to have an external, objective source for the meaning of life is not necessary at all since the supposed external entity is itself most likely a product of the human imagination.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI disagree with your point "So the 'necessity' you describe of having to have an external, objective source for the meaning of life is not necessary at all since the supposed external entity is itself most likely a product of the human imagination." If the energy that channels through the body is what is causing the next link in evolution in the brain, then choosing to believe makes all the difference and hence the need for this article. Energy cannot be created or destroyed so it evolves, right? :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf "[the]study showed that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see words and faces on a screen when there were none, whereas skeptics often did not see words and faces that were actually there...", would it be fair to suggest that charismatic leaders who can lead a crowd into following them have more dopamine in their frontal lobes? Cause what I want to understand personally is how 2000 years later we still can't disprove the qualities that made a man seem godly enough and was smarter, or equally evolved than us even today. We want to believe in mirror blackholes that bend time but not in a God. Is it their brains have more dopamine? That's it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is interesting about religious believers regarding god as an object or person isn't that they think it's real, but that they think it's an object or a person.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn other words, when they claim to believe that god is "love" or "the ground of all being" or "too vast for us to understand", they are probably lying.
Surely atheists who meditate would make a good control group, then.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"thinking about God may activate the same parts of the brain as thinking about an airplane, a friend or a lamppost", but nothing edible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe benefits of meditation are a recurring theme. What I'd like to know is what it takes, quantitatively, to meditate, and what other activities we might do that would give us a similar benefit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor example, while I'm a little too athiestic for heavenly day-dreaming, I do enjoy the occasional cycle ride. Is the endorphin high in any way similar to the effect of meditation?
I hope it is. Sweating it out seems a lot quicker and simpler than spending hours meditating.
Obviously thinking about different subjects in a differentiated objective manner would generate both x, or/and y effect on space/energy 'connectivity' within brain structures as defined by 'modern' medicine. The question is NOT if GOD exists, the question is what is GOD, and how it is perceived by an ordinary brain in a such way that would foster holistic brain activity improvement both socially and personally for improving the betterment mutual existence and longevity of true happiness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is voodoo neuroscience. There are no real controls in such studies. Are there differences in the brains of very strong religious believers vs. those with weaker religious beliefs? What about the difference between atheists and agnostics? What about the differences in the brains of religious believers and those of mathematicians who spend a lot of time pondering mathematical questions? When is neuroscience going to grow up and stop being advanced phrenology?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans behave much better when they believe in being taken care of by God whatever one's interpretation is. When someone misbehaves is due to the feeling of not being taken care of. See statistics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReligious brains are tax exempt, and display a marked proclivity towards telling other brains what to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI question the premise. "Atheist" is a word invented by theists who see the world in religious terms. But I bet the mental processes of religious fundamentalists and doctrinaire Communists and any Scientologists all resemble each other far more than the either the average Episcopalian or the average empiricist--the word that better describes many so-called "atheists."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd by the same token that Episcopalian and that empiricist probably resemble each other more at the process level than either does with his putative but more fanatical brethren.
One other point: I don't see how the existence of a God automatically confers meaningfulness on one's life. That deity might judge any one of us--or all of us--as meaningless, after all. What if He thinks the same of us as we do of some dust on our piano's keys?
I see that I just said something very similar to what erozycki said in comment #10.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe religious is more prone to fantasy. It takes a lot of imagination to believe in an "unseen friend." When an atheist claims he has an unseen friend, it is imaginary. When the religious claims he has an unseen friend, it is god. Had society not invented religion, we would also refer him to a psychiatrist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe non-religious is more skeptical. They are less believing in the unseen even in the seen. They are less likely to believe in magic even if they see it with their eyes.
These behaviors may have something to do with parts of the brain responsible for imagination, fantasy, rational and logical thinking.
Let's start calling religious people "unempiricists" or people who are non-empircal, and atheists "empiricists," or people who are empirical.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause I'm not "non-religious." I'm not non-Albanian, non-dwarf, non-Rhode Island resident, non-autistic. Those things are all true of me, but any time you describe someone as non-something you bias the discussion in favor of whatever the person isn't.
This isn't just semantic squabbling. It's like the old real estate saying: "I'll let you name the price if you let me name the terms."
If I can frame the debate I'll win it before it begins.
www.blogzu.blogspot.com
Scientists seem to me to be interpreting these data back to front.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey try to understand why certain types of brain produce certain beliefs or behaviours, when the most probable explanation is that certain ways of using the brain "shape" the brain.
The reason that born agains have a smaller hippocampus than atheists (or less committed believers) was given in another SA report (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-learning-brain-gets-bigger-then-smaller). Using the brain to ask questions makes the brain grow. Born agains do not need to ask questions because they already know the answer, which is the same for every question. That is why brain size was found to be inversely related to the commitment to religious belief.
But what that study showed was that even atheist brains shrank when they learned the answer, which the brain embedded in fewer neuronal connections. That suggests that the brain did not evolve to work things out. It evolved to learn lots of automatic, intuitive responses which were stored in the big brain.
Remember that the human brain evolved over millions of years among hunter gatherer ancestors who had no speech, so it evolved to observe and non-consciously absorb attitudes, behaviours and responses to situations, to produce automatic responses without the need for conscious thought. That is why there was almost no innovation among human ancestors until they changed their lifestyles 10,000ya.
The human brain seems to have evolved with a need for an explanation for events and when there was no obvious physical cause, it accepted a metaphysical cause. When humans began to use conscious processes 10,000ya they invented consciousness. In the new complex societies they began to develop, hunter gatherer beliefs in spirits morphed into religions that were better suited to those new, organised societies.
There has been no religious organ found in the brain, but there is plenty of evidence that the brain is innately predisposed to accept illogical, irrational explanations for events, explaining why so many people in supposedly rational modern societies profess beliefs with no rational evidence to support them.
That means that modern humans who apply logic are using the brain in ways the brain did not evolve to be used.
What separates the brains of hunter gatherers, modern born agains and logical, rational thinkers are not structurally different brains, but different ways of using the brain that happen to have a physical effect on the brain.
www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com
Human beings behave much better when they are positively reinforced for such behavior. When they have a history of being told that God is watching over them, so they had better behave or they will be punished that doesn't stop them from misbehaving. Criminal statistics show that believers are just as likely if not more likely to engage in criminal acts as non-believers. How can that be explained?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that the brain get restructured depending on the way it is used, at least the neural networks. But I disagree that consciousness was invented or evolved only 10,000 yrs ago and the brain did not evolved to be logical.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertainly humans were conscious before 8,000 B.C. They began living in cities and early civilization around that time. It was largely due to the end of the last glacial period and the invention of agriculture. It was favorable climate and abundant food supply that gave rise to civilization, not the increased complexity and function of the human brain which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
The brain evolved for the species to survive. If intelligence and logical thinking give survival advantage, intelligent creatures will evolve. But the level of intelligence will vary depending on the competitive environment. Not necessarily human-level intelligence. Dolphins are smart but not smart enough for SETI astronomers. Their definition of intelligent life is creatures that can build a radio telescope.
WHO says that ATHEISTS don't meditate? And this idea of separating humans into smaller and distinct subsets, is REALLY ridculous! Take it from an atheist!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I am Indian ,my experiences are limited with India.Indian society is more traditional and religious children rared in religious societies they watched from childhood how their parents worshiping,fasting,naturally that kind of software created in their brain they follow what their parents.Cultural impact more effect on child`s brain than gene.If any child rared in atheist family he developed that kind of software in his brain.I think brain of child is elasticities parents can mold it with their choice
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAtheist or believer is not the point; everyone has a transcendental appetite as they have appetites for sex, food, water, air, and all the essentials of physical and conscious life. Who and what fulfills that transcendental need is the question. An impediment to finding answers is our belief in whatever form the idea takes that life on earth is the reason for the universe. We do not have or want the humility to see that life on Earth proves that life is generic in the Cosmos, the other possibility is vanishingly small. If we could see ourselves from the next higher level of consciousness than humans possess, we would probably appear as ant colonies appear to us. I like to think of us as Mants, having the commonality of ants and the individuality of man. The need for faith is the measure of uncertainty; the atheistic accepts it, the religious denies it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what if life is meaningless externally? I embrace the meaninlessness of the life and universe in all its glory. All the so-called gods I have heard and read about are incompetent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetter off without them. At least that's my life experience. I'd rather believe in myself than some moronic deity.
I say again:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo tell me, why is this article here? It may be immensely interesting to Atheists, but this is not Scientific Atheist magazine. We're all sick of reading religion-atheism junk in SciAm. Get back to science!
The way the author uses the term "God" implies that such a mythical being actually exists. A less biased approach would be to use "a god", as in "The brain of an atheist might have inherited the talent to revere [a god](natural law) more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHuman ancestors evolved our brain over millions of years. One of the great puzzles has been the almost complete lack of innovation during that time.
Hominids could not have survived without using external objects such as stones, bones or lumps of wood to defend themselves. Antelope femurs and other types of bones with signs of having been used as clubs, scrapers or stabbers have been uncovered, but no sign of deliberate modification to produce better tools or weapons, so even though their brains were even then larger than other animals, hominids did not innovate.
When the first humans evolved just over 2mya the great innovation was chipping stones to produce more effective tools. After modern humans evolved just over 200,000ya their major innovations were better stone tools. They still lived as hunter gatherers in the Stone Age.
So if the human brain evolved to work things out, it did not work many things out for the first 2 million years.
There was no sudden magical change in the brain that made conscious thought possible. What we call consciousness was a product of humans using the brain differently.
The sudden drop into the Younger Dryas mini ice age 11,000ya forced humans to consciously work out a totally new lifestyle. Humans began to innovate 10,000ya using the brain that had evolved to do the oppossite, to pass on existing hunter gatherer practices from generation to generation through millions of years.
Developing new societies that were larger and more complex than hunter gatherer groups required continuing innovations. The first cities with signs of central administrations did not appear until 6,000ya, after a long dry period had forced populations to concentrate into river valleys.
On the issue of consciousness, studies of macaques have identified automatic responses to known circumstances. When circumstances changed, those automatic responses were intercepted by conscious processes and modified to suit the changed conditions. The respones worked out by those conscious processes were slower and less consistent than the automatic ones.
Humans share the primate brain that evolved to learn and store responses to situations so it could produce fast, expert responses. If humans had relied on working out responses to situations, they would have been dead before they worked it out.
We know that in emergency situations people often freeze. They respond better if they have been through response training. Brains CAN work things out, but that is not what they evolved to do and not what they do best.
A number of Christians have changed and become Atheists. In fact a major Charismatic pastor became an Atheist. Likewise, a number of Atheists have changed and become Christians. That includes the Atheist who had prayer kicked out of public schools in the United States. Did their brains suddenly change? Perhaps Satan took control of the brain of one and God the other.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisZap, Your frontal lobes are smaller, ha, ha, ha, God.
Reply, Yes, but I have this one, Zap, his are bigger.
Of course there is a difference: One works, the other doesn't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe brain did not evolve only to do rational analysis. That is just one of the many tasks the human brain can do. Logical thinking and instinctive reaction are not mutually exclusive. The brain is capable of both though not at the same time. It is incorrect to conclude that the brain did not evolve to do rational analysis because it is not needed for survival in short life-and-death situations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, the human brain did evolve and it is capable of rational analysis. Was it just an accident? I don't think so. Natural selection favors the intelligent brain that can do logical thinking. Agriculture, clothes, cooking, shelter, weapons require intelligence and it gave humans tremedous survival advantage over other animals. As humans became smarter, they became more dominant. It wasn't an accident. It is consistent with the laws of nature.
This sound very plausible.I always thought that there should be difference in brain structure and transmitters between all humans not only religious and non-religious.However it looks for me more complex than of what mentioned in this article because our brain is very complicated organ as all of us know.And there should be enteractions between several neurones and synapses in order to the brain to give it's eventual order.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Effectively", you smug self-satisfied atheistic snothead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting jump of logic: "For instance, one study showed that when religious people prayed to God, they used some of the same areas of the brain as when they talked to an average Joe. In other words, in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn other words, (Some?) brain topology provides a measure of "reality"?! Did people who pray to Vishnu differ from those who pray (or not) to Elegú or YWWH?
What about people who are religiously atheist? (As are Christians, Jews and Muslims who refuse to accept the lordship of Odin?)
And are there "atheists" -- however not defined -- and "religious people" -- however vaguely identified -- who use other parts of the brain when talking to an average Joe or to their TV screen?
It appears to me that interesting research is being undermined by a rush to reach "sexy" conclusions. Is this a market phenomenon?
Ron Scheurer • Brain differences may have more to do with how the brain stores the sensory perceptions we have, and how it later retrieves and assembles those images for subsequent thought and analysis. If memory is holographic it could produce considerable differences over sequentially stored memory. If memories have to be reassembled from different sensory places in the brain those places may vary in size.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisITS EXPECTED THAT they couldnt see things on the screen that were actually there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my experience, atheists are impaired. They are socially awkward--not all, of course. The ones who rise to positions of power usually communicate fine but that is certainly not the norm.
In the sciences 75% of Doctors are theists. The job is about one on one intimate help and care for humans. Yet science fields that impact Origins-- are impersonal and more suited for the loner type. I was in Math club....I know what most of the people were like. Very awkward, compulsive, good at science but not much of anything else. In fact, deficient in many other things. Such as sports, girls, relationships.
An Atheist convention looks like a star trek convention without women-- mostly the serial killer profile. It is normal to believe in God so the studies should be on the atheist mind and why it denies what is obvious to most humans through history.
Look, no one who is abnormal can see it-- so I expect strong denials but they're mostly white compulsive men. Of course there are the drug addicts, heavy metal artists, and sociopaths types too but Im talking about the ones who gather-- sign mission statements, or group together on forums speaking out. They all fit a certain profile. There are at least 5 billion theists on earth and umpteen billion throughout history from every race, social group, education, you name it..there is no way to categorize the norm by definition