Religious Belief at the Level of the Brain

Abstract

This article summarizes key functional magnetic resonance imaging studies that correlate the neural substrate of religious belief and the influence of culture. I searched and updated PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) publications until March 2018 on religious belief and related topics. Belief, whether religious or nonreligious, is associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), a brain region important for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behavior. However, religious belief, compared with nonreligious belief, registers greater signal in the precuneus, anterior insula, ventral striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior medial cortex-areas associated with governance of emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict. In contrast, nonreligious belief registers more signal in the left hemisphere memory networks (Harris et al. PLoS One 2009;4:e0007272). Moreover, cultural studies revealed self-judgment tasks in nonbelievers involved more the vMPFC, whereas Christians had significantly increased activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (Han et al. Soc Neurosci 2008;3:1-15). Consequently, the Christian belief of "surrendering to Christ" seemed to weaken neural coding of stimulus self-relatedness but enhanced neural activity underlying evaluative processes of self-referential stimuli. The findings suggest a transformation of the semantic autobiographical self to Christ's conceptual self.

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