This is your brain on God
Scientists found that having a religious or spiritual experience activates the brain's "reward circuits" in the same way that love, sex, gambling, drugs and music do.
More than 5.8 billion people say that religion and spirituality have some influence on their lives. Yet scientists know very little about what happens in the brain when someone is having a religious experience. Why does one person feel peace, joy and positivity, while another feels motivated to carry out an act of violence? Are the same neural networks in the brain responsible for both? Or do they differ from one person to the next?
These and many other questions are the focus of new research from neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
The findings, part of the university's Religious Brain Project, have the potential for identifying how people are different and how they are the same when it comes to religion and spirituality.
Interesting reading via DiscoveryNews
http://www.seeker.com/this-is-your-brain-on-god-2117877144.html
Journal article:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17470919.2016.1257437?scroll=top&needAccess=true
#neuroscience #research #humanbrain #religion #medicine #health
Matt B Craniometry was just such an attempt. They went into prisons and measured the skulls of inmates under the theory that intelligence (and criminality) was related to the size and shape of the brain.
ReplyDeleteI would be wary of hoping that we could pinpoint social disfunction in a couple MRIs and scared of what would happen if we could.
Matt B I would say that there are those with brain abnormalities that live normal lives, and those with structurally normal brains who act abnormally. That and that psychopathy is not well defined.
ReplyDeleteI simply do not want us to approach it as so cut and dry as good brain/bad brain, because it's really not. And literature has much to say on the dangers of a society that pre-judges.