THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthings are made. Mountains are described by children as existing so that
people can go climbing; rivers so that boats can come and go on the water.
It’s easy to see how religious belief could flourish in minds predisposed to
see the world in this way.
All this focus on explaining the ubiquity of religion ignores an
elephant in the room – atheism. If the human mind is so predisposed
toward religion, how come so many people are atheists? A recent
British survey, for example, found that 43 percent of respondents
reported having no religion. This is actually a little-researched field and
psychology doesn’t as yet have many answers. Watch this space, however,
because academics are hoping to rectify the situation soon. Late in 2008
Lois Lee at the University of Cambridge and Stephen Bullivant at the
University of Oxford together set up the Non-religion and Secularity
Research Network – an interdisciplinary and international organization
- for just this purpose.
Is there a God spot?
Calling it a God spot may be crude, but there’s certainly ample
evidence that the temporal lobes, located near the ears, are especially
implicated in various religious and spiritual states, such as feeling at
one with the world. For over a century there have been documented
associations between temporal-lobe epilepsy, where the seizure
epicentre is located within the temporal-lobes, and powerful feelings
of religiosity. There’s also the work of Michael Persinger at Laurentian
University in Ontario – he claims that his “God helmet”, which applies
weak electrical stimulation to the temporal lobes, reliably provokes
feelings of oneness and a sensed presence in volunteers.
Other researchers, however, say that it’s more accurate to think
of a “God network” rather than a God spot. Andrew Newberg at the
University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of Tibetan Buddhists
and Franciscan nuns, meditating and praying, respectively, and found
that feelings of oneness with the world tended to co-occur with
attenuated neural activity in the left-orientation area of the parietal
lobe – an area that under usual circumstances represents where our
body ends and the world begins. Mario Beauregard at the University of
Montreal, meanwhile, has scanned the brains of fifteen nuns recalling a
time when they had a powerful connection with God. Compared with
recollection of an intense social experience, memories of this religious
connection were associated with extra activity in a whole swathe of
brain regions. These included the insula, involved in representing
internal bodily states, as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex,
involved in emotion and reward.