Do atheists and religious believers have different brains?

One question in the book Ask the Brains is: ‘Do atheists and religious believers have different brains?’

Quite a few.

People who meditate or pray for years (the brain activation involved in these two activities is very similar) have more developed frontal lobes. The frontal lobe is connected to attention and the reward system.

People who have had a born-again experience have smaller hippocampi. The hippocampus is involved in both emotion and memory. Hmm, one of George W. Bush’s favorite stories when he was running for president was that he had been a reckless troublemaker in his youth, and later found new life through faith.

Religious believers have higher levels of dopamine in their brains. This neurotransmitter is an old friend of ours; it is closely tied to motivation and pleasure.

Religious believers are better able to see a word or… a face in a chaotic pattern with no clear rules. Atheists, by contrast, tend to overlook words or faces that really are present in blurry images. Interestingly, when atheists take a drug that raises the dopamine level in their brains, they can then see faces and words in those chaotic patterns.

For people who believe in God, the brain regions activated when they think about God are the same as those activated when they talk about a real object or someone standing beside them. In other words, in the brains of religious believers, God feels as real as something right there that they can touch.

But all of the conclusions above are correlational; they do not represent cause and effect. For example, we cannot conclude that faith raises dopamine levels, nor can we say that people with higher dopamine levels are more likely to become religious. They are merely correlated. The current research can only tell us that the brains of religious believers and atheists show some different features. As for the causal relationship—or anything along those lines—we simply cannot determine it yet.

p.s.:

Everyone in my family came down with this wave of flu last week. I’ve been on IV fluids for several days and am still recovering, so the audio programs on Ximalaya have to take a one-week break. They’ll return to normal next week, so please bear with us for a few more days.

Everyone, do get plenty of exercise too, and remember to keep warm and protect yourself from the cold!

Note

• This series of articles, ‘Psychology: New Knowledge in Small Lessons,’ consisted of short popular-science pieces and miscellaneous reflections written back then to accompany material related to Zhichao Wei: Psychology—A Course on New Knowledge. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.