Media coverage hyped the importance of findings suggesting that spiritual experiences have a brain basis. Even so, an evolved capacity for self-transcendence fits in well with what we know about the evolutionary role and function of religion.
The Evolution of Religion
Religious beliefs and rituals are found in every society studied by anthropologists. This implies that religious/spiritual experience is a universal characteristic of human beings just as the capacity to see in color is.
Religion could not have evolved and could not have affected the lives of the majority of the world's human inhabitants if it had not helped them to solve the problems of surviving adversity and of raising children successfully who would propagate their supernatural belief systems after they had died.
So it makes sense that the brain might be specialized for religious experiences. Indeed, an evolutionary perspective on religion implies that humans are inherently susceptible to religious views.
This view is bolstered by evidence that spiritual experiences (including religious experiences) have a neural basis. Although there is no single "God spot" in the brain, feelings of self-transcendence are associated with reduced electrical activity in the right parietal lobe, a structure located above the right ear.
Self-transcendence, or a sense of the otherworldly, is the opposite of being self-focused and is a convenient definition of spirituality and/or religious sensibility used by researchers. This perception is generated by many experiences in addition to religion, including brain trauma, drug states and epileptic seizures.
Spiritual experiences use many different parts of the brain: the God spot is functional rather than anatomical. So what are the likely benefits of having such neural mechanisms for spiritual experiences?
So what is the God spot used for?
In an earlier post, I argued that a primary function of religious beliefs and rituals is as a form of emotion-focused coping with the difficulties of life. It functions rather like the security blanket that a small child employs to soothe itself when distressed.
The security blanket concept of religion has a lot going for it. It explains why people pray during a crisis, and why people living in the most miserable places on earth are universally religious. On the other hand, in societies that experience a good quality of life, religion loses its importance, and atheism breaks out. This is what is happening in the social democracies of the world from Sweden to Japan.
Such "comfortable" modern societies are an anomaly, of course. Prior to the emergence of such uniquely favorable conditions, life was always full of difficulties. That is why religion is a human universal. It is also the reason that our religious sensibilities are served by specialized functions of the brain. These snap us out of the self-absorption otherwise induced by misery and produce self-transcendence or a feeling of other worldliness.
This is not exactly a God spot because it is neither localized as a spot, nor peculiar to experiences related to a deity. Yet it adds a dimension to our understanding of religious experience and explains why even people in secular countries remain deeply spiritual.
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Indeed, the great cultures in history did NOT rise (or fall) because of their religious convictions (as diverse as they were) but because of a particular allignment of their technological or social development with their environment (or a failure thereof). The Romans, for instance, were no different from their immediate neighbours in terms of religious ideas. Indeed, they simply liked to copy whatever they saw. Their "survival advantage" lay in both a superior military technology/strategy and in their intense (but non-religious) lust for power.
Based on their religiousity, the Egyptians should have been a global superpower, yet, they never made it past their immediate region of influence. And so on... one can find any number of counterexamples against the main thesis in this article.
As for the time period during which "religiosity" may have made a real difference to human survival, i.e. BEFORE written history, we have next to no data.
For most people,religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. Gene Roddenberry.
Further, the factualness of god's existence will not be proven by the already-found fact that all human beings ask this kind of question (we are "hard-wired," as it were), or if we locate where the question arises in the brain, or by the fact that we come up with a huge variety of speculative answers to it throughout history--though of course implications abound.
Also, neuroscientists might want to look in the language centers of the brain--because it's the basic structure of language, as fundamental to human beings, that enables us to be self-present and to "throw" ourselves-as-other into the past, other-present, and future in the way that we do--hence, opening us to history and to the question of our mysterious existence, beyond our animal-present. So the "godspot" is probably to be found in or associated-with our language center.
FAITH is also an arrow in the scientist's quiver. That is, we all have hope and faith that we can find the answers to our questions?
For more on the fundamental structure of language and its relationship to history and transcendence, see:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ZsPZLGgOsih1JyvAxGFl6XSoc-h-Qt7E9CX_lznXus/edit
Catherine B. King
The Jesuit boast, 'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man'.
That religion survived does not mean that it was favored, all that can be said is that we evolved despite and in spite of the religious conservatives who have always resisted demographic, cultural and technological advancements.
It will be interesting to see if these psychological/cultural factors are confirmed by neuroscience.
Pschotics, who have great difficulty coping with a world as it is, develop an alternate reality which they can cope with. No one would say that this alternate reality is true even if it does help psychotics to survive.
Susceptibility to religious beliefs may just be a mildly pschotic brain mutation that works in a troubled life but, in the long run, isn't really healthy.
Given that life really IS tough, and really IS unfathomable, it's a bit too easy to compare faith and psychosis.
It is possible- said possible!- that these brain patterns correspond to reality. As for security blanket religion-much religious activity is clearly counter to biological survival.
Not all the , e.g., martyrs were scared kids, hoping God would answer their prayers and make things nice. Of course the hard wire for causality and unity could also lead to, e.g., Spinozism-nothing supernatural there-it is God OR Nature.
There are other religions in which powerful Gods throw lightning bolts to kill Earthlings. Again, the unexpected and sudden strike of lightning out of a "blue sky" that has killed a person has been known probable even to the Neanderthals. A vengeance of God must have done that. Right?
Are animals stunned when one of theirs is suddenly killed by by lightning stroke? You bet they are and they then have fear-based "religious feelings" just as humans have.
The more such false perceptions disappear the more grows the need to explain religiosity as a function of the human brain which, like the preceding examples, will eventually also end up in the garbage can of mythology.