The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (30 page)

Religion and spirituality have been associated with a variety of benefits in physical health. They are correlated with lower rates of heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, and high blood pressure.
¹²
Because coronary heart disease is such a pervasive health threat, the fact that religion and spirituality are connected to lower rates is of considerable interest from the standpoint of public health. Positive relationships have been broadly observed for men and women, for people of all ages, and for a variety of faiths, including Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. Besides cardiovascular health, religiosity has also been associated with lower rates of cancer mortality.

Such physical health benefits are observed in those who experience religion in a healthy-minded way. However, it is also possible for religiosity to be harmful to health, as Kevin Seybold and Peter Hill described:

The positive effects of religious and spiritual experience on health are based on the assumption that the experience itself is positive and healthy. Of course, religion and spirituality can also be pathological: authoritarian or blindly obedient, superficially literal, strictly extrinsic or self-beneficial, or conflict ridden and fragmented. Indeed such unhealthy religion or spirituality can have serious implications for physical health, having been associated with child abuse and neglect, intergroup conflict and violence, and false perceptions of control, with resulting medical neglect.
¹³

Mental health is also related to religiosity. For example, religion and spirituality have been positively associated with general psychological functioning, well-being, and marital satisfaction, while correlating negatively with suicide and the abuse of alcohol and drugs.
¹⁴
Intrinsic religiosity has also been shown to reduce the dread of death. German researchers recruited participants in a Munich coffee shop soon after a terrorist attack in Istanbul and asked about their degree of fear that such attacks would take place in the near future on German soil.
¹⁵
They also completed a questionnaire that assessed intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation.

The results showed that intrinsic religious belief precluded the need to
invoke terror-management defenses. Individuals who scored low in intrinsic religiosity showed substantial evidence of strengthening their convictions about whether a terrorist attack was possible in Germany.
¹⁶
They actively sought information that confirmed their prior beliefs about their social world and violence. By contrast, those with strong religious beliefs turned to those beliefs to cope: they more often went to church, prayed that no more attacks would occur, and regarded their belief in God as an effective way to cope with the fear of terrorist attacks. Importantly, the researchers found that those with a high degree of intrinsic religiosity experienced a reduction in death-related thoughts, contrary to the usual consequence of being reminded of one's mortality. Terror-management defenses were unnecessary for this group because mortality salience “does not induce increased accessibility of death-related thoughts as it does for nonreligious or low intrinsically religious people.”
¹⁷

What might account for the positive relations between religiosity and health? There are many possible factors at work. For example, the positive emotion of gratitude could mitigate risks for depression and other mental health problems.
¹⁸
Gratitude involves recognizing a self-gain of value, while attributing that gain to the actions of someone else. It is thus a complex emotional response to receipt of a gift. For example, it is easy to imagine the feeling of gratitude that would come from an act of altruism, not reciprocal altruism, in which one anticipates that helping another person will result in that individual becoming obligated to return the favor, but a gift of help with no strings attached. There is also the sense of wonderment and awe provoked by the beauty of nature that can provoke gratitude to God, for those whose religious beliefs include a creator of the universe. Indeed, a deep perception that life itself is a gift from God evokes equally deep gratitude. Religious worship routinely incorporates expressions of praise and thanksgiving to God. The scriptural texts, prayers, rituals focus the attention of the worshiper on the gifts and mercies of God, inculcating a presence of gratitude. Perhaps positive emotional effects of such worship help in regulating the immune system, the autonomic nervous system, and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Similarly, forgiveness may enter the equation, as “most religious accounts of optimal human functioning include the capacity to seek forgiveness and grant forgiveness as key elements of the well-functioning human personality.”
¹⁹
The need to seek forgiveness depends on a social intelligence that understands how others think about one's transgressions. Being able to empathize with how another person must feel lies at the root of the experience of guilt. Of interest, in psychopaths these theory-of-mind capabilities are blunted, with the consequence that they experience neither empathy with their victims nor guilt about their transgressions. Ability to feel compassion and willingness to forgive the harm others have done requires not only an advanced social intelligence, but also the executive functions of working memory that resist the impulse to seek recompense or even revenge and suppress emotional responses of anger. Thus, forgiveness is another interesting dimension of spirituality that requires the ensemble of parts found only in the human mind. There may also be positive health consequences associated with forgiving others and seeking forgiveness by exercising the capacities of the mind's modern ensemble.

One intriguing lead is evidence that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—a brain region serving the conflict-resolution function of executive attention in working memory—is affected by religious beliefs.
²⁰
Environments that pose uncertainties, conflicts in goals that must be resolved, and errors in responding activate the ACC. In short, the situations that provoke anxiety and the need for control are signaled by the alarm bell of the ACC.

Researchers studied the ACC in a task called the
Stroop task
, in which participants must name the ink color of a series of color words. For half the words, the semantic meaning of the word (e.g.,
blue
) matched the ink color and correct response (i.e., blue). For the other half, the correct response was incongruent with the word's meaning (e.g.,
green
printed in blue ink). The incongruent trials pose a conflict between automatically reading the word and wanting to say green and inhibiting that immediate response and trying to say the correct ink color (i.e., blue). Participants slow down to resolve the conflict when making correct responses on incongruent trials, but sometimes they make errors and say green instead of blue.

Electroencephalographic recordings typically reveal strong neural activation of the ACC on incongruent trials. Yet people with strong religious convictions were able to minimize the alarm bell of the ACC in the Stroop task. Based on a standardized measure of religiosity, participants who scored
high in religious zeal had less ACC activation to uncertainty and error in a simple laboratory decision task.
²¹
A second study found the same outcome for a milder form of religiousness; that is, the degree to which participants expressed a belief in God (ranging from certain that God exists to certain that God does not exist). Participants who were more certain about the existence of God exhibited less reactivity of the ACC and also greater accuracy in their decision making with fewer error responses. The researchers suggested that “conviction provides frameworks for understanding and acting within one's environment, thereby acting as a bulwark against anxiety-producing uncertainty and minimizing the experience of error.”
²²
Religious belief might, therefore, provide a means for coping with uncertainty and reducing anxiety and distress. The reduced ACC response could be part of a pathway that links to the HPA axis that mediates stress and immune responses.

Another possible health advantage of religious belief is as an aid to self-control of harmful behaviors.
²³
Religious communities provide a social norm for behavior and encourage self-monitoring of behavior. Religious rituals also promote self-monitoring; for example, “preparing for weekly confession (for Catholics), the season of Lent (for many Christians), and the Yom Kippur holiday (for Jews) are supposed to involve examinations of one's spiritual and moral short-comings.”
²⁴
Besides aiding with monitoring of immoral or harmful behaviors, religious rituals, prayer, and meditation are all possible contributors to self-regulatory strength. Although a good deal more research is needed, the existing evidence is consistent with “the proposition that religion's ability to promote self-control or self-regulation can explain some of religion's associations with health, well-being, and social behavior.”
²⁵

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

A striking variety of religious experience described by James is relatively rare but profound and highly distinctive. In mystical states of consciousness, James found four unique characteristics.
²⁶
Mystical states of mind are ineffable, meaning that words cannot capture their qualities or meanings. Mystical states are at once both an expression of emotion and a state of knowing; they blur the
difference between truth as an intellectual and rational state and awe or wonder as an intuitive and irrational commodity. Third, mystical states are relatively transient, lasting no more than thirty minutes or so. Fourth, and of considerable significance from the perspective of neuroscience and religion, the mystic feels carried away by a force far larger than the self. As James noted, “The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
²⁷
Although full-blown mystical experiences are rare, James recognized that many have experienced the rudiments of mysticism in a sudden appreciation or insight such as occurs in most people's everyday experience. Words said and deeds done many times in the past are suddenly comprehended with new meanings. For example, James cited the experience of Martin Luther in his sudden apprehension of the Nicene Creed:

“When a fellow-monk,” said Luther, “one day repeated the words of the Creed: ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins,’ I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightaway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open.”
²⁸

James further discussed the conversion vision of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus as well as the spiritual ecstasies of Saint Teresa of Ávila to illustrate the ineffable and otherworldly nature of mystical experiences: “The deliciousness of some of these states seem to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness.”
²⁹

Neuropsychologists are naturally curious about what might be happening in the brain during mystical experiences of these sorts. One hypothesis is that they represent a seizure of a specific form in the temporal lobe of the brain. Patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy describe the hallucinations they experience during their seizures in mystical, spiritual terms, including “sensations of sudden ecstasy and religious awe; with increased interest in religion and even religious conversions; with out-of-body experiences;…and in some cases, with the perceived presence of God.”
³⁰
Another line of inquiry has drawn parallels between mysticism and the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis. Could it be that the religious visions of mystics are nothing more than temporal lobe seizures or psychotic breaks with reality?

James warned against the simplistic reduction of spiritual experiences to conditions of neurology. He called it the “the too simple-minded system” of medical materialism.
³¹
One flaw in such efforts to explain away mystic states as nothing more than odd neurology is in the incompleteness of such explanations. How can knowing the neurological states associated with a religious experience inform us about its spiritual significance and truth? Scientific or aesthetic or ethical thoughts can also be reduced in a simplistic way to neurological states, but the value or truth of these thoughts certainly are not decided one way or the other by knowing their neurology. James recognized that to single out only religious thoughts as inauthentic because of their neurological correlates is illogical and nothing more than prejudice against the notion that religious experience can be significant and true. James argued that

scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul…. To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological changes. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our
dis
-beliefs, could retain any value of revelations of truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.
³²

That the brain is equipped for spiritual experiences could be just as readily seen as evidence for their reality. The normal assumption of evolutionary science is that the brain is adapted to pick up information from the environment that is important to the organism. Motion perception and color perception, for example, are seen as adaptive, and that is why the primate brain has these capacities. Could it be that, in the modern ensemble, the human brain is adapted to perceive reality at a spiritual level?