Cognitive Study Of Religion Has Recently Reached A New, Unknown Land: The Minds Of Unbelievers Which Maybe Different From Those Of Believers
By Miguel Farias
January 19,
2021
The
cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds
of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there
something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what they’ve
found, I will focus on three key snapshots.
Do
atheists think differently? patrice6000/Shutterstock
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The first
one, from 2003, is probably the most photogenic moment of “neuro-atheism”.
Biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins travelled to the lab of Canadian
neuroscientist Michael Persinger in the hope of having a religious experience.
In this BBC Horizon film, God on the Brain, a retro science-fiction helmet was
placed on Dawkins head. This “god helmet” generated weak magnetic fields,
applied to the temporal lobes.
Picture
of Richard Dawkins.CC BY-SA
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Persinger
had previously shown that this kind of stimulation triggered a wide range of
religious phenomena – from sensing the presence of someone invisible to
prompting out-of-body experiences. With Dawkins, though, the experiment failed.
As it turned out, Persinger explained, Dawkins’ temporal lobe sensitivity was
“much, much lower” than is common in most people.
The idea
that the temporal lobes may be the seat of religious experience has been around
since the 1960s. But this was the first time that the hypothesis was extended
to explain the lack of religious experience based on the lower sensitivity of a
brain region. Despite the exciting possibility of testing this hypothesis with
a larger sample of atheists, it remains to be done.
Rodin’s
The Thinker. wikipedia, CC BY-SA
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The second
snapshot takes us to 2012. Three articles published by labs in the USA and
Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking
style to unbelief. Psychologists have been theorising about different ways that
brains process information for a long time: conscious versus unconscious,
reflective versus experiential, analytical versus intuitive. These are linked
to activity in certain brain areas, and can be triggered by stimuli including
art. The researchers asked participants to contemplate Rodin’s famous
sculpture, The Thinker, and then assessed their analytical thinking and
disbelief in god. They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed
better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than
people who hadn’t seen the image.
In the same
year, a Finnish lab published the results of a study where their scientists
tried to provoke atheists into thinking supernaturally by presenting them with
a series of short stories and asking if the punchline was a “sign of the
universe” (interpreting something as a “sign” is more supernatural than
interpreting something as, for example, a coincidence). They did this while
scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The
more the participants suppressed supernatural thinking, the stronger the
activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus was. We know this area is
involved in cognitive inhibition, an ability to refrain from certain thoughts
and behaviours.
Together,
these studies suggest that atheists have a propensity to engage more in
analytical or reflective thinking. If believing in gods is intuitive, then this
intuition can be overridden by more careful thinking. This finding certainly
raised the possibility that the minds of atheists are simply different from
those of believers.
Replication Crisis
So how
robust are the findings? In 2015, a “replication crisis” hit the field of
psychology. It turned out that the results of many classic studies couldn’t be
achieved when running them again. The psychology of religion and atheism was no
exception.
The
experiment with Rodin’s Thinker was the first to be investigated. Three new
studies were conducted with larger samples than the original — and they all
failed to replicate the original results. With one sample, they found the very opposite:
contemplating the Thinker increased religious belief.
One
possible limitation with the original studies is that they had all been
undertaken in the USA. Could culture act in such a decisive way that the
analytical cognitive style associated with atheism in one country might be
nonexistent elsewhere? The author of the original Rodin study attempted to
answer this in a new study which included individuals from 13 countries. The
results confirmed that a cognitive analytical style was only linked to atheism
in three countries: Australia, Singapore and the USA.
In 2017, a
double-blind study was carried out to test in a more robust way the link
between unbelief and cognitive inhibition. Instead of using brain imaging to
see which area lit up, they used a brain stimulation technique to directly
stimulate the area responsible for cognitive inhibition: the right inferior
frontal gyrus. Half of the participants, however were given a fake stimulus.
The results showed that the brain stimulation worked: participants who had it
achieved better in a cognitive inhibition task. However, this had no effect on
decreasing supernatural belief.
The Complexity Of Atheism
The third
snapshot is this one: a man is standing against a background which looks like a
church. He appears to be doing the sign of the cross with his right hand while
his left hand rests on his heart. He is a priest – but not of any church that
believes in gods: he presides over the Positivist Temple of Humanity, a church
for atheists and agnostics created by August Comte in the 19th century. This
priest is not doing the sign of cross but the Positivist blessing.
Together
with photographer Aubrey Wade, I stumbled upon this active temple in the south
of Brazil, while collecting data for a large ongoing project involving over 20
labs across the world: Understanding Unbelief.
Image of a man doing the
positivist blessing.
Positivist blessing. @Aubrey
Wade, Author provided (No reuse)
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Finding an
active church of unbelievers dedicated to the love of humanity — its golden
principle being “live for others” — ruptured how I thought of atheists and the
boundary separating them from the religious. And this has implications for how
we develop studies in this area. When doing experiments with believers we can
use multiple stimuli, from religious images to music, to trigger a religious
effect or cognition in the lab. But finding an equivalent for unbelievers has
proved hard.
One brain
imaging study conducted at Oxford University compared an image of the Virgin
Mary with that of a regular woman, both painted in the same period. Researchers
found that when Roman Catholics concentrated on the Virgin Mary while being
subjected to electric shocks, this alleviated their perception of pain compared
to looking at the other woman. This decrease in pain was associated with an
engagement of the right ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex, a region known to
drive pain inhibitory circuits.
No similar
effect was found for the unbelievers, although they rated the secular image as
more pleasant than the religious one. But what if the unbelievers being tested
were members of the Positivist Temple and were instead shown an image of their
goddess of humanity — would this have alleviated pain in a similar way to that
experienced by the religious individuals?
The future
cognitive science of atheism will have to think hard about how to move forward.
It needs to develop models that account for cultural variations as well as
consider the implications of atheists engaging with rituals that celebrate humanity.
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Miguel Farias is Associate Professor in
Experimental Psychology, Coventry University
Original Headline: Are the brains of atheists
different to those of religious people? Scientists are trying to find out
Source: The Conversation
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/cognitive-study-religion-recently-reached/d/124143
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