Whether you are a human being whom is considered religious are not, you have a particular number spots and synaptic-trail in your brain that leads to an ability for an appreciation of the “spiritual experience,” or better still….a series of “God Spots”.
Recently, according to an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers investigating the workings of the human brain during MRI and CAT scanning believe they have located the area(s) of the brain that get triggered for religious belief and the God-experience.
Despite the ridicule that some intellectuals give to the “spiritual experience,” the functional breakdown of it is located in the highest centers of the human brain, where these areas become a bevy of electrical activity when triggered by discussions or thoughts relating to the abstract, metaphysical, spiritual and religious.
According to Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland (USA) — these newest findings, which studied both religious and non-religious human subjects, fit nicely with past results that indicate there is not just one location – or God spot – in the brain and are suggestive “….that religion is not a special case of a belief system, but evolved along with other belief and social cognitive abilities.”
Future studies plan on zeroing in on specific religions such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and others to see if the brain’s God Spots react differently depending on the particular religious belief being pondered. This particular study focused mainly on how Christian belief in the Western world was dealt by the human brain.
“The more interesting studies will wind up comparing different belief systems with similar dimensions to see if they also activate the same brain areas,” Grafman said. “If they do, we can better define why those brain areas evolved in humans.”
To purchase and read the full Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article GO HERE. For a list of other cognitive articles in the PNAS by Grafman, et. al CLICK HERE.
[Headline image courtesy of Fox Sci-Tech News]
[Article image courtesy of Scientific American]
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