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By Root 604 0

or spiritual epiphany. Thus, spiritual practice is the key to making God personally meaningful and real. But for a researcher like myself, even the simplest ritual is hard to study because there are so many variables to consider. Take, for example, the act of going to church. We know that religious involvement is correlated with health and longevity,1 but it is difficult to figure out why. Does it have to do with the length of time you spend in church, or how often you go? Does it matter which denomination you attend? Going to church might involve confession, communion, singing, chanting, praying, tithing, talking with other members, reading sacred scriptures, or volunteering in charitable work. Which activity has an impact on the brain? Some of them, all of them, or a specific combination of pursuits? Few studies have been able to isolate which aspects contribute to one's health, but we are beginning to discover that each one can change the way you think and feel about God.

Different religious activities have different effects on specific parts of the brain, but this does not make the results any easier to interpret. For example, praying silently affects one part of the brain, while praying out loud affects another part. And if you repeat the same prayer over and over, one part of the brain may be activated in the first few minutes, another part might quiet down ten minutes later, while other brain functions will change after forty or fifty minutes of intense prayer.

To make matters even more complicated, a single structure in the brain can be simultaneously involved in dozens of different functions, some of which specifically relate to the religious ritual and others of which do not. For example, the anterior cingulate cortex, which plays a crucial role in spiritual practices, is involved with learning, memory, focused attention, emotional regulation, motor coordination, heart rate, error detection, reward anticipation, conflict monitoring, moral evaluation, strategy planning, and empathy.2 To understand how this single structure influences religious experience, you have to distill the information gathered in hundreds of seemingly unrelated studies. But when you connect the dots, a picture emerges that allows us to catch a glimpse of the neural reality of God.

This chapter, and the four chapters that follow, outline a general model that explains how different concepts of God affect your brain, and how your brain constructs specific impressions of God. The chart on the accompanying pages summarizes how specific parts of the brain generate different experiences of God.

THE “GOD” CIRCUITS IN YOUR BRAIN

From early childhood on, God exists in every persons brain as a combination of ideas, images, feelings, sensations, and self/other relationships. Here is a thumbnail sketch of key neural structures and circuits that shape our perception of God:

OCCIPITAL-PARIETAL CIRCUIT Identifies God as an object that exists in the world. Young children see God as a face because their brains cannot process abstract spiritual concepts.

PARIETAL-FRONTAL CIRCUIT Establishes a relationship between the two objects known as “you” and “God.” It places God in space and allows you to experience God's presence. If you decrease activity in your parietal lobe through meditation or intense prayer, the boundaries between you and God dissolve. You feel a sense of unity with the object of contemplation and your spiritual beliefs.

FRONTAL LOBE Creates and integrates all of your ideas about God—positive or negative—including the logic you use to evaluate your religious and spiritual beliefs. It predicts your future in relationship to God and attempts to intellectually answer all the “why, what, and where” questions raised by spiritual issues.

THALAMUS Gives emotional meaning to your concepts of God. The thalamus gives you a holistic sense of the world and appears to be the key organ that makes God feel objectively real.

AMYGDALA When overly stimulated, the amygdala creates the emotional impression of a frightening, authoritative, and punitive