Tag: Brain

Religious believers may seem to share little with nonbelievers when it comes to thinking and judgment. But a new study by UCLA researchers finds that both Christians and nonbelievers use the same parts of the brain when asked to label articles of religious faith as true or false. A report summarizing the study is published today in PLoS ONE.

This study was funded, in part, by Project Reason.

A slideshow from the book “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century”, a collection of pictures of the brain made by scientists studying the brain.

A new imaging method developed at Stanford reveals the complex array of synapses in the cortex.

Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for the similarities between religions. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…

Neuroscientists are digitizing the sections of the brain of a famous amnesiac, hoping that preserving his brain will allow future scientists to further study how memories are formed.

Brain science is remarkably close to offering a full naturalistic explanation of individual religious experiences, everything from certain belief to moral indignation to mystical rapture to spiritual transformation. This article wraps up a series reviewing current knowlege and concludes that more and more supernatural explanations of religious experience are simply unnecessary.

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

New study of the brain shows that facts and beliefs are processed in exactly the same way.

Sam Harris, Jonas Kaplan, and colleagues publish the first study to compare religious faith to ordinary belief at the level of the brain.

Some will recognize the many “one-liners” pulled from this text.  While this is not the full essay, I believe it to be the full chapter titled “The World As I See It”.

Once we had evolved the necessary brain architecture, we could “do” religion, brain scans indicate.

Brain scans back up the theory that more recent evolutionary changes to the human brain allowed the development of religion.

Most folks probably couldn’t locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it’s at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.