Religion is a Mental Illness

New study links brain network damage to increased religious fundamentalism

Recent research found that damage to specific brain networks, primarily in the right hemisphere, is linked to higher levels of religious fun

PsyPost - Psychology News

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that specific networks in the brain, when damaged, may influence the likelihood of developing religious fundamentalism. By analyzing patients with focal brain lesions, researchers found that damage to a particular network of brain regions—mainly in the right hemisphere—was associated with higher levels of fundamentalist beliefs. This finding provides new insight into the potential neural basis of religious fundamentalism, which has long been studied in psychology but less so in neuroscience.

Religious fundamentalism is a way of thinking and behaving characterized by a rigid adherence to religious doctrines that are seen as absolute and inerrant. It’s been linked to various cognitive traits such as authoritarianism, resistance to doubt, and a lower complexity of thought. While much of the research on religious fundamentalism has focused on social and environmental factors like family upbringing and cultural influence, there has been growing interest in the role of biology. Some studies have suggested that genetic factors or brain function may influence religiosity, but until now, very little research has looked at specific brain networks that could underlie fundamentalist thinking.

The researchers behind this study wanted to address a critical gap in understanding how brain lesions might affect religious beliefs, particularly fundamentalism. Prior research suggested that damage to the prefrontal cortex could increase fundamentalist attitudes, but this work was limited to small sample sizes and focused only on one part of the brain. The authors of the study hypothesized that instead of a single brain region being responsible, religious fundamentalism might arise from damage to a distributed network of connected brain regions.

“My primary interest is and has been mystical experience. But in the process researching the cognitive neuroscience of mystical experience, I came across brain network associations with religious fundamentalism,” study corresponding author Michael Ferguson, an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of Neurospirituality Research at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics.

To explore whether damage to specific brain networks could influence the likelihood of holding religious fundamentalist beliefs, the researchers used a method called lesion network mapping, which helps identify how different regions of the brain are connected and how damage to one area might disrupt related brain functions. The study involved two large groups of patients with focal brain damage, giving the researchers a unique opportunity to analyze how different types of brain lesions might be linked to religious beliefs.

The first group consisted of 106 male Vietnam War veterans who had sustained traumatic brain injuries during combat. These men, aged between 53 and 75 at the time of brain imaging, were part of a long-term study conducted at the National Institutes of Health. The second group included 84 patients from rural Iowa who had experienced brain injuries from various causes, such as strokes, surgical resections, or traumatic head injuries. This second group was more diverse in terms of gender and had a broader range of injury causes.

Both groups completed a scale designed to measure religious fundamentalism, which asked participants to respond to statements reflecting rigid and inerrant religious beliefs, such as the view that there is only one true religion or that certain religious teachings are absolutely correct and unchangeable.

For each participant, the researchers mapped the precise locations of their brain lesions using advanced imaging techniques like computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These scans were then analyzed using lesion network mapping to see how damage to certain brain areas was connected to changes in religious fundamentalism scores. The researchers also compared the brain lesion data to a larger database of lesions associated with various neuropsychiatric and behavioral conditions, which helped them understand how the brain regions linked to religious fundamentalism overlap with those involved in other psychological traits.

The researchers found that damage to certain areas of the brain, particularly in the right hemisphere, was associated with higher scores on the religious fundamentalism scale. Specifically, lesions affecting the right superior orbital frontal cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, right inferior parietal lobe, and the left cerebellum were linked to increased religious fundamentalism. In contrast, damage to regions such as the left paracentral lobule and the right cerebellum was associated with lower scores on the fundamentalism scale.

“The strength and reproducibility of the signal between psychological self-report measures of religious fundamentalism and the functional networks we identified in the brain surprised me,” Ferguson told PsyPost. “It increases confidence in the results.”

Interestingly, the researchers noted that the brain regions identified in this study are part of a broader network connected to cognitive functions like reasoning, belief formation, and moral decision-making. These areas are also associated with conditions like pathological confabulation—a disorder where individuals create false memories or beliefs without the intent to deceive. Confabulation is often linked to cognitive rigidity and difficulty in revising beliefs, characteristics that are also found in individuals with high levels of religious fundamentalism.

The researchers also found a spatial overlap between brain lesions associated with criminal behavior and this fundamentalism network, which aligns with previous research suggesting that extreme religious beliefs may be linked to hostility and aggression toward outgroups.

“It’s sobering, but one of the takeaway findings is the shared neuroanatomy between religious fundamentalism, confabulations, and criminal behavior,” Ferguson said. “It refocuses important questions about how and why these aspects of human behavior may be observed to relate to each other.”

The researchers emphasize that damage to this brain network does not guarantee that a person will develop fundamentalist beliefs, nor does it imply that individuals with strong religious convictions have brain damage. Instead, the findings point to the possibility that certain brain networks influence how people process beliefs and how flexible or rigid their thinking becomes, especially in the context of religion.

“A major caveat is that these results do not indicate that people with strong religious beliefs confabulate or that individuals high in religious fundamentalism commit crimes,” Ferguson explained. “Rather, our data may help us understand the style of cognitive or emotional processing that increase or decrease the probability of holding fundamentalism attitudes.”

The authors suggest that future research should explore how this brain network influences religious fundamentalism in more diverse populations, including people from non-Christian religious traditions or from different cultural backgrounds. It would also be valuable to study patients both before and after brain injuries to better understand how changes in the brain might affect religious beliefs over time. Additionally, research could investigate how this brain network relates to other types of belief systems, such as political ideologies or moral convictions, to see if similar patterns of cognitive rigidity or reduced skepticism emerge in these contexts.

“The personal beliefs of the authors span a broad continuum from adherents of religious faiths through agnosticism to atheism,” Ferguson noted. “We approach the weighty subject matter of this research as earnest seekers of scientific data and encourage readers to receive our results in the spirit of open-minded empirical inquiry driven by scientific curiosity and without prejudice or malice to any group or faith.”

The study, “A neural network for religious fundamentalism derived from patients with brain lesions,” was authored by Michael A. Ferguson, Erik W. Asp, Isaiah Kletenik , Daniel Tranel, Aaron D. Boes, Jenae M. Nelson, Frederic L. W. V. J. Schaper, Shan Siddiqi, Joseph I. Turner, J. Seth Anderson, Jared A. Nielsen, James R. Bateman, Jordan Grafman, and Michael D. Fox.

Religious fundamentalism is a global and enduring phenomenon. Measuring religious fundamentalism following focal brain damage may lend insight into its neural basis. We use lesion network mapping, a technique that uses connectivity data to identify functional brain networks, to analyze two large, independent datasets of brain lesion patients. We found a network of brain regions that, when damaged, are linked to higher religious fundamentalism. This functional network was lateralized to the right hemisphere and overlaps with the locations of brain lesions associated with specific neuropsychiatric and behavioral conditions. Our findings shed light on neuroanatomy that may influence the emergence of religious fundamentalism, offering implications for understanding the relationship between brain networks and fundamentalist behavior.

Religious fundamentalism, characterized by rigid adherence to a set of beliefs putatively revealing inerrant truths, is ubiquitous across cultures and has a global impact on society. Understanding the psychological and neurobiological processes producing religious fundamentalism may inform a variety of scientific, sociological, and cultural questions. Research indicates that brain damage can alter religious fundamentalism. However, the precise brain regions involved with these changes remain unknown. Here, we analyzed brain lesions associated with varying levels of religious fundamentalism in two large datasets from independent laboratories. Lesions associated with greater fundamentalism were connected to a specific brain network with nodes in the right orbitofrontal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal lobe. This fundamentalism network was strongly right hemisphere lateralized and highly reproducible across the independent datasets (r = 0.82) with cross-validations between datasets. To explore the relationship of this network to lesions previously studied by our group, we tested for similarities to twenty-one lesion-associated conditions. Lesions associated with confabulation and criminal behavior showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with greater fundamentalism. Moreover, lesions associated with poststroke pain showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with lower fundamentalism. These findings are consistent with the current understanding of hemispheric specializations for reasoning and lend insight into previously observed epidemiological associations with fundamentalism, such as cognitive rigidity and outgroup hostility.

A Neural Circuit for Spirituality and Religiosity Derived From Patients With Brain Lesions

Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spiri

Biological Psychiatry

Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved.

In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105), we applied lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.

We found that brain lesions associated with self-reported spirituality map to a brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray. Intersection of lesion locations with this same circuit aligned with self-reported religiosity in an independent dataset and previous reports of lesions associated with hyper-religiosity. Lesion locations causing delusions and alien limb syndrome also intersected this circuit.

These findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity map to a common brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray, a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning, pain modulation, and altruistic behavior.

Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism - PubMed

Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has iden

PubMed

Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI). If the vmPFC is crucial to modulating diverse personal religious beliefs, we predicted that pTBI patients with lesions to the vmPFC would exhibit greater fundamentalism, and that this would be modulated by cognitive flexibility and trait openness. Instead, we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with vmPFC lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.

“… fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.” -- Jonathan Rauch, “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought”

"If you do or do not believe in god and do or do not repost this something will or will not happen."

"Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake." -- Christopher Hitchens

The Reformers - Deleted Scene

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In the deleted scene above, Peter proposes a thought experiment to his philosophy class. He asks his students how they would have gone about discrediting the pseudoscience of phrenology at the height of its popularity. This not-so-subtle dig at the identity studies departments is an interesting way to think about how theories can flourish into fields with almost no connection to material reality.

The scene highlights Peter, James, and Helen's fundamental critique of the identity studies canon, which is that it gains legitimacy by mimicking scientific forms but doesn’t adhere to the expectations of the scientific method. Allow me to flesh this perspective out by drawing a comparison.

A scientific theory emerges from the observation of facts. It’s a kind of story we tell about how certain groups of facts relate to each other and why they show up in the way they do. There’s an expectation among scientists that you should be able to familiarise yourself with a scientific theory and then use its principles to predict something new and verifiable about the world.

A Critical Theory, however, which is the genre of theory studied in the identity studies departments, doesn’t hold itself to this expectation. Critical theorists claim that the social sciences must integrate philosophy into their methods to make their findings work practically toward a moral cause. Where the purpose of a scientific theory is to understand the world as it is, the purpose of a Critical Theory is to change the world into something it ought to be.

Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Queer Theory, the three heads of the Social Justice hydra, are all different methods of criticising Western social norms from the perceived perspectives of outsider identities. I use the word “perceived” here because critical theorists are self-appointed representatives of the groups they study and they seek to generate a particular kind of “oppressed” perspective among thier subjects rather than exploring their authentic thoughts and feelings.

They critique everything, from the way we form couples, to how buildings are designed, right down to the way white people prepare food. Thier seemingly bottomless body of criticism is now decades old and is actively disseminated with the aim of “liberating” non-normative identities from the bondage of conservative social values and customary expectations.

While some scholars working with Critical Theory use these theoretical frameworks as starting points to do real research, the standards of the field have devolved so badly that a fundamentalism has emerged from their vast body of work. This happens through a process I call “theoretical laser surgery,” where a scholar imbibes so much abstract theoretical philosophy that they can’t unsee it. Critical Theory is no longer a lens to apply to particular phenomena but a worldview grafted into every aspect of their consciousness.

Differing from scientific practitioners who are required to attempt to disprove their starting assumptions, these fundamentalists start with their conclusions and move into the field to accumulate proof and punish dissent. They write papers, books, articles and tweets, devise courses and workshops, create art and films, and contort statistics to reify their beliefs and evangelise their worldview.

The quasi-religious movement that proceeds from this body of work is my narrow definition of “Woke.” They themselves call their worldview a “critical consciousness,” and they seek to create a mass awakening to the oppressive superstructures of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and white supremacy, through our centres of cultural production - academia, law, media, religious institutions, and the arts.

I think it’s important to keep this label narrow and avoid applying it to the vast array of left-wing sensibilities that are now popularly deemed “Woke.” The work done by the fundamentalists in these fields, and now far beyond, informs many people I wouldn’t consider fundamentalists at all. If you make a distinction between the activists I’ve described above and your garden-variety leftie with technocratic leanings, you can paint a more detailed picture of how something like this has been able to claim so much power from within ostensibly liberal institutions.

"A theory is scientific if it has the property where a person can articulate an instance in which it would be wrong, in which it can be falsified.

If I tell you 'if the light is blue, x is true, and if the light is red, x is true,' that's not a scientific statement because there's no way that it will not be true at the end. I have to be able to propose an instance in which you might prove me wrong.

This is a very appealing idea, it has a bravado and a wagering quality to it, that a scientist must risk being wrong in order to be a scientist.

In 1919, eclipse expedition which confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and what most impressed him about it wasn't the ambition of the theory or the fact that it was confirmed. What he liked about it was Einstein said, 'if starlight isn't measured to bend around the sun during this eclipse then my theory is incorrect.'

He liked the wagering on being wrong. And he thinks that's the basic status of what a scientific theory is."

“Why should you believe in something for which there is no reason to believe? Where it becomes positively dangerous is if you start fighting with somebody else who has a different faith from yours and each of you is equally convinced that you are right and the other one is wrong. And precisely because it appeals only to faith, and not evidence, there is no way you could settle the argument other than killing each other. Whereas, if you disagree, as two scientists disagree, two scientists can sit down together, look at the evidence, and say, "Oh, I was wrong. I overlooked that bit of evidence" or, "Here's a new bit of evidence just come in which shows that my previous theory was wrong." Scientists, at least in principle, will come to an agreement when all of the evidence is in. But that's not what faith-based people do. They say, "I know I'm right. End of story." That's dangerous.”

-- Richard Dawkins

"Faith doesn't have a corrective mechanism. It leaves no room for one to revise their beliefs... If your beliefs aren't in alignment with reality, then you could be mistaken about what's good for you. And if you're mistaken about what's good for you, then you can't change the external conditions in your life to help you flourish as a human being."

-- Dr. Peter Boghossian

"I hate it when people say 'there is no god'. I can't prove there is, but you can't prove there isn't!"

Okay. Well, I hate it when people say there is no evil, sock-stealing goblin in my dryer. I can't prove there is, but you can't prove there isn't!

Not being able to disprove a belief doesn't mean that belief and disbelief are on equal footing.

"Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson