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colleagues scanned the brains of thirty subjects, fifteen self-reported Christians and fifteen self-reported nonbelievers, while they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For example, a religious statement was “Jesus Christ really performed the miracles attributed to him in the Bible.” A nonreligious statement was “Alexander the Great was a very famous military leader.” The subjects were instructed to push a button indicating that they thought a statement was true (belief) or false (disbelief). Once again, response times were significantly longer for those who perceived statements as false compared to those who interpreted the same statements as true. Tellingly, while both Christians and nonbelievers were faster in responding “true” than “false” on both religious (“Angels really exist”) and nonreligious (“Eagles really exist”) stimuli (because it’s easier for everyone to agree than it is to disagree), nonbelievers were especially quick on the draw to respond to religious statements.

Inside the brain, these scans revealed that for both believers and nonbelievers, for both religious and nonreligious statements, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which as noted before is associated with self-relevance, decision making, and learning in the context of rewards, showed an increased signal—that is, more blood delivering oxygen. It’s a “dopaminergic system”—remember, dopamine is a neurotransmitter substance associated with pleasure and is involved in the reinforcement of learning. This was the case whether the subjects believed statements about God or statements about ordinary facts. In fact, a direct comparison between belief and disbelief in both believers and nonbelievers showed no difference, leading Harris and his colleagues to conclude “the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent.” That is to say, both believers and nonbelievers appear to evaluate the veracity of both religious and nonreligious claims in the same area of the brain. In other words, there is no “belief” module or “disbelief” module in the brain, no gullibility network or skeptical network.

Subtracting out the response to nonreligious stimuli from the response to religious stimuli revealed a greater BOLD (blood oxygen level–dependent) signal for religious stimuli in the anterior insula (associated with pain perception and disgust) and ventral striatum (associated with reward), as well as our old friend the ACC, the error-detection and conflict-resolution network. So religious statements provoked more positive and negative effects. Subtracting out the response to religious stimuli from the response to nonreligious stimuli revealed an increase in brain activity in the hippocampus, which is well known to be directly involved in memory retrieval. Tellingly, this was the case for both believers and nonbelievers, leading Harris and his colleagues to “speculate that both groups experienced greater cognitive conflict and uncertainty while evaluating religious statements,” and that “judgments about the nonreligious stimuli presented in our study seemed more dependent upon those brain systems involved in accessing stored knowledge.”39

Why is this a surprising finding and what’s so telling about it? I put the question to Harris, who responded: “I think, given the subject matter, both groups were less certain of their answers. The surprise, of course, is that it was both groups. One might have expected Christians to be less certain that ‘the Biblical God really exists’ than that ‘Michael Jordan was a basketball player.’ But atheists seem to show the same effect when evaluating a statement like ‘The Biblical God is a myth.’”

I also asked Harris about the deeper implications for beliefs and how belief systems work in his discovery that such beliefs appear to be “content-independent.” That is, why does it matter that there is only one neural network for belief and disbelief rather than a believing neural network and a skeptical neural network? “It suggests that belief is belief is belief,” Harris noted