Religion on the brain

By Amy Frykholm

Nina Azari has been looking at the brains of religious people. Azari is a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii who is working on a doctorate in theology at Illiff Seminary in Denver. She wants to find out what human brains do when engaged in religious activity. In its March 19 issue, The Economist reports on her scientific experiment:

[Azari] used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The Christians all said that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helped them enter a religious state of mind, so both groups were scanned in six different sets of circumstances: while reading the first verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a happy story (a well-known German children's rhyme), while reciting that story out loud, while reading a neutral text (how to use a calling card) and while at rest.

Azari expected that the Christians who were reciting Psalm 23 would show activity in the limbic systems of the brain, where emotion is regulated. Instead, the increased activity was in the frontal and parietal cortex, which regulate rational thought. The less religious group did not show activity in this region of the brain, and the only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the happy story.

Azari calls religious experience "thinking that feels like something." She argues that religious experience requires the brain to work in multiple ways at once, drawing from several regions of the brain.
Religious people understand this; many have long maintained that faith and reason work in harmony, and that religious activity is not a flight from reason, but a complex expression of it.

I'm troubled, however, by the choice of "fundamentalist Christians" as representative of all "religious people." Would a fundamentalist Christian conceive of religious activity very differently than I would? Are our brains doing the same thing when we recite the 23rd Psalm?

Comments

[Becky]

I had the same reaction. Did the researcher think perhaps that fundamentalists were the "most religious" and therefore would exhibit the clearest reaction to Psalm 23? I'd love to see the work re-done with a wider variety of the faithful.Then someone should do it with other-than-christian religious people. Interesting work though. thanks for pointing it out.

[Jeff Lackie]

The choice of 'fundamentalists' (I would be interested in the researcher's definition of the term also) makes it more noteworthy that the reaction was recorded in the area of the brain thought to control rational thought rather than emotional response. This seems to be gentle affirmation for those of us who are not routinely carried away by an emotional response to the activity of God in and around us. I'm not opposed to the question "how did that make you feel?" where theology is concerned, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of the question "What do you think of that?"

[LJ Aladeen]

There are a number of aspects to this story that are interesting to me. Like Becky, I am intrigued by the researcher's choice of "fundamentalists" as representative of "Christians." Is this. perhaps, symptomatic of the secular perception of fundamentalists as the only "real" Christians? Also, I'm wondering how the researcher arrived at the hypothesis that people who were "not atheist" can be simultaneously "non-religious." I would propose that the phrase "not atheist" implies a belief in something (or someone), which, in my book, would qualify the individual as "religious." Perhaps Aziri merely meant "non-Christian" instead of "non-religious."

[Amy Frykholm]

I am really intrigued by these categories as well. I think it shows how difficult this work is. It reminds me of Christian Smith's thesis in his book American Evangelicalism that evangelicals are "stronger" Christians than main-liners in part because, he says, they are less likely to experience doubt. I always wondered about this as an understanding of "strength." And of course, Christopher Hitchens likes to say, polemically, that fundamentalists are the only truly religious people. Something is afoot culturally that is, I think, unhelpful in understanding what it is to be religious.

Maybe Aziri means "spiritual but not religious" when she categories the group as "non-religious but not atheist." Yet this too is notoriously vague.

If you were going to do this experiment, how would you construct the categories?