How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [42]
Without this capacity for visual imagination, we would barely be able to think. Even when we sleep, our visual representations of the universe remain active, albeit in unusual ways. Children, however, do not have the neural capacity to easily separate fantasy from fact, and so they form beliefs that blur the boundaries of reality. They easily believe that their nightmares are real, while adults have advanced neural processes to help them analyze perceptual discrepancies.
The imaginations of children run wild, and this makes it easy for them to define God with simple pictures and words. Furthermore, the ways they hear adults talk about God will also contribute to the images they form. If you tell a child that God can see you, or listen to your prayers, then the child's imagination will associate those qualities with the eyes and ears of a face. If you tell that same child that God gets angry, the brain will generate images of frowns, gritted teeth, or perhaps fists banging against a wall—visual constructions that represent how a child perceives anger in other human beings. If you tell your child that God can perform miracles, then the internal imagery takes on superhuman traits. For example, one boy drew God with a cape and a large S on his chest.
Girls, by the way, draw somewhat different pictures than boys. They tended to use more symbolic and abstract representations, and in Hanisch's study, a small percentage of seven-year-olds drew female representations of God. Neurologically, we know that males and females process emotional words in different ways and in different parts of the brain, and this may explain the subtle differences.9
Slowly, a concept of an anthropomorphic deity evolves in the child's brain. As the brain begins to make the neural connections needed for abstract reasoning, religious images become more abstract. Yet abstract concepts will still be visually processed. Thus, a notion like love or compassion—which has no physical form in the world—might be “seen” as a heart or a hand reaching out to another. Happiness may be drawn as a smile, guilt or shame may be represented through the use of dark colors, and an all-powerful benevolence might be drawn as a sun radiating down on the Earth. But when it comes to our most primal sense of God, it all begins with a face.
GOD IS A NOUN
We are born with a neurological mechanism to identify objects, and the first objects infants learn to identify are their family and caretakers. With each new object that a child learns to recognize, the brain labels it, the first of many steps that turn an image into a concept and a word. Thus, the first words infants speak are those that identify the people they see.10 But the only part of the person that an infant recognizes is the face.
Young children can only grasp the simplest concepts because the neurological capacity to comprehend abstract concepts won't mature until adolescence.11 The easiest type of word for children to learn is a concrete noun, because it refers to something the child can see, touch, or taste.12 Young children cannot understand words like “peace” or “democracy” because these are highly sophisticated ideas, and the places in the brain where abstract nouns are processed remain poorly developed for many years. A young child's brain has no choice but to visualize God as a face that is located somewhere in the seeable physical world, and this is what we find when we analyze the pictures drawn by children younger than ten.
Brain-scan studies show that nouns are linked primarily to visual object-processing regions.13 Furthermore, each time a novel idea is introduced, the brain responds with increased activity in specific parts of the right hemisphere,14 in the same areas that construct our visual representations of reality. Thus, when a child is introduced to a spiritual concept, the brain automatically gives it a sense of