The topic of religion
and the credibility of supernatural experience has frequently been a source of
debate within the public sphere. The prominent idea was that the more educated
a person is, the more likely they are to question the supernatural. Recently,
however, people have turned from the idea that education alone reduces the
likelihood of being religious, and instead are focusing on individual factors
such as differences in information processing and executive function.
The Dual Process
Accounts of Reasoning Theory proposes that there are two distinctively separate
cognitive systems that underlie thinking and reasoning. The first system,
called “implicit” or unconscious reasoning, refers to the automatic or
intuitive processing of information. When finding an optimal solution to a
problem seems impossible or impractical, it’s thought that individuals use
mental shortcuts (heuristics) to speed up the process. The second system is
called “explicit” or conscious reasoning, and it performs the more slow,
sequential, and rational thinking. An article by Time Magazine examined
these different ways of processing information in relation to religiosity. Dr.
David Rand, the director of Yale University's Human Cooperation Laboratory,
conducted a study using the Cognitive Reflection Test to assess individuals’
likelihood to rely on heuristics when solving a riddle, rather than using
deliberative, analytical thinking. He found that the frequency at which
individuals gave intuitive answers was positively correlated with the strength
of their religious beliefs. According to Rand, “some people have an intuitive
tendency to attribute intention to the world around them: that somebody
intended something to happen to you.” In contrast, a deliberative person is
more likely to perceive that something happened to them as the result of a
series of events, or as having no explanation.
Along with differences
in ways that individuals tend to process information, impairment in certain
neural structures has also been associated with greater religiosity, insofar as
individuals are more likely to interpret ambiguous experiences as mystical or
due to a supernatural phenomenon. The frontal cortex and temporal cortex (TC)
are known to mediate cognitive (executive) and affective functions that might
be relevant to the expression or inhibition of mystical experiences. It has
been theorized that the down-regulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(dlPFC), which is involved in inhibitory control and error monitoring, could
lead to a tendency to believe that certain sensorial experiences are mystical.
An article entitled “Neural correlates of mystical experience” investigates
this claim further. Cristofori, Bulbulia, Shaver, Wilson, Krueger, and Grafman
proposed that selective damage to the dlPFC would be associated with greater
mystical experiences, while lesions to the temporal cortex would result in
fewer mystical experiences, due to the TC’s role in generating mystical
experiences. They administered a measure of mystical experience (M-scale) to
combat veterans, some of whom suffered from penetrating traumatic brain injury
(pTBI) and some of whom did not (i.e., healthy controls), and then performed a
voxel-based lesion-symptoms analysis (VLSM) on total M-scale scores between the
two groups. Lesions in the frontal and temporal cortex (i.e., individuals in
the pTBI group) were associated with higher M-scale scores. They also
administered a Sorting test, which evaluates semantic verbal fluency and
problem-solving, and found that the scores were negatively associated with M-scale
scores for the pTBI group but not for the control group. This suggests that
lower mysticism was associated with higher executive function performance. They
then separated individuals from the pTBI group into subgroups based on whether
the injury was to the dlPFC or TC, and compared them. Individuals with lesions
in the dlPFC had a significantly lower score on the Sorting test than the
healthy controls, but not compared to the TC group, and no difference was found
between the TC group and the controls. Also, the mysticism scores for the dlPFC
group were significantly higher as compared to the control group, but not
compared to the TC group. Ultimately, results showed that an intact dlPFC is
needed to regulate mysticism, due to its role in regulating executive
functions.
Much research is still
needed to further our understanding about how humans experience and form
interpretations about the world. It is for this reason that phenomena that
cannot easily be explained are likely to continue being a hot topic in the
realms of both science and religion.
References:
Basu, T. (2015, September 22). Here's Why Some
People Are More Religious Than Others. Time Magazine.
http://time.com/4038407/religion-intuition-deliberation/
Cristofori, I., Bulbulia, J., Shaver, J. H.,
Wilson, M., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2016). Neural correlates of
mystical experience. Neuropsychologia, 80, 212-220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.11.021
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