Those wacky scientists and their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines are at it again! Now they're using them to locate the parts of the brain that light up when you think about religious beliefs.
Of course, this will be reported in Fox News as Finding God in the Brain. You Betcha! Awesome!
Jordan Grafman and his team write in their abstract:
We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 principle psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
So belief in God evolved as a useful adaptation through natural selection...hmmmmmmm. That's what I thought, too.
Read all about it: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/03/06/.abstract
tags: science evolution religion fmri
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