![]() The point of using baseball as a comparison was to signal the fact that the religious lives of people are incredibly complex and diverse, involving all sorts of situations, responses, engagements, and life perspectives. Moving to a different domain of life helps us see more clearly the issues surrounding the neuroscience of religion. In order to convey a perspective on the neuroscience of religiousness, I wondered what it might be like to substitute “baseball” for “religion” in these research projects-i.e., a neuroscience of baseball. My chapter was the conclusion, and my job was to review and discuss points made from the other chapters. I once wrote a book chapter that I entitled “The Brain, Religion, and Baseball.” 5 It was the last chapter of an edited book involving chapters describing studies on the neurology of religious experience (not unlike the Religious Brain Project at the University of Utah). The presence of these assumptions means that religious life gets reduced to nothing-but brain states associated with internal experiences elicited by a few decontextualized stimuli. The other problematic assumption is that human religiousness can be adequately telescoped down to a form of subjective internal experience elicited by certain “religious” stimuli. One is that brain activity associated with a religious experience will be functionally unique-that is, that the brain will function in a way that is unique to religious experiences and distinct from other forms of brain functioning. There are two implicit assumptions of this sort of study that I find questionable. There is not a particular area of the brain that is always active during mental processing that is experienced as religious. However, each study finds a different pattern of brain activity associated with the religious condition, and thus different forms of religious activity or experience are related to different patterns of activity in the brain. 4 Since it is pretty clear that all of human life and experience is tied up in some way with the functioning of our brains, it is not surprising that something is seen in each of these brain imaging studies. For example, studies of brain activity have been done with respect to meditation (both Christian and Buddhist), prayer, listening to Scripture passages, and judging theological statements to be true or false. Typically, these experiments involve having persons see, hear, and/or meditate on religious stimuli or themes, during which the patterns of activity in the brain are measured using fMRI or other measures of brain activity. The answers I give to questions about the brain and religiousness constitute a part of my contribution to the larger work of the School of Psychology on the integration of theology and psychology.Īs described on “The Religious Brain Project” website, this study at the University of Utah aims to find “answers to fundamental questions, like ‘What happens in the brain during religious or spiritual experiences?’ and ‘How is the brain changed by religious experience?’ We also want to understand which brain networks contribute to religious feeling.” 3 This study is similar in design and experimental questions to a number of other studies of the neuroscience of religiousness. ![]() We are in a cultural phase in which brain and neuroscience are buzzwords invoked in many conversations with a certain degree of cachet. We are in a scientific era in which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is making it possible to observe distributions of activity throughout the brain while people are mentally doing interesting cognitive, social, and emotional tasks-such as viewing pictures showing social interactions, solving moral dilemmas, or imagining an emotional experience. ![]() What is the nature of religiousness and what does it have to do with the brain?īeing a neuropsychologist at a theological seminary, this is the sort of issue about which I am often asked to comment. She had read my article on the neuroscience of religiousness on the website of the International Society for Science and Religion 2 and wanted my perspective on the relationship between brain function and religiousness, and on what this sort of research can tell us about religion. ![]() She was doing a story about research going on at the University of Utah involving studies of brain activity during religious experiences, 1 and she wanted me to comment on the research. I recently received a phone call from a producer of the TechKnow program on Al Jazeera. ![]()
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