This is your brain on God.
(Laughter)
As a graduate student here at the University of Utah,
my team and I had the opportunity to look inside the brains
of believing Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons,
when they were praying, reading scriptures
and watching videos of the religious leaders' teaching.
Being based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Mormons are not in short supply.
(Laughter)
We recruited through the Deseret News, the LDS Church-owned newspaper,
and invited devout members of the religious community
to participate in psychometric testing
and functional magnetic resonance imaging,
or fMRI.
fMRI is a wonderful scientific tool.
It allows us to measure tiny fluctuations in oxygenated blood flow
that correspond to neural changes in activity.
While our participants were inside of the scanner,
they had a button box attached to their chest
so that they could press a button and indicate to us in real-time
when they were feeling the Spirit.
It's a cultural phenomenon
that's a central, epistemological event
significant to the truth claims of the Mormon religion.
What we observed was that across all task conditions,
the three areas of the brain
that consistently demonstrated elevated activity
were the frontal attention regions,
the medial prefrontal cortex
and the nucleus accumbens -
an area of the brain
with an enriched supply of the reward molecule, dopamine.
Far from just being a high tech blobology,
this Trinity of neural regions sketches what we can reasonably label
as the neuro spiritual system of Mormonism.
The implications are profound, both for culture and for the brain.
One of the first questions that comes to mind for me is,
"Does this neuro spiritual system from Mormonism
map into the brains of religious individuals from other faith traditions
when they are having peak, ecstatic religious experiences?"
So many of the world's spiritual traditions
report profound feelings of oneness with a transcendent source,
often accompanied by an increased charitable disposition.
Could it be that these cultural variations
are all being supported by a common core of brain networks?
For the first time in the history of contemplative philosophy
and the sciences of the mind,
we can answer these questions empirically by skillfully measuring brain activity
with more temporal and spatial precision than we've ever been able to do
even in the recent past of neuroscience.
This is an exciting time to be a brain researcher.
Let's talk about the word "God" for a moment.
It's a simple three-letter word in English,
yet this one word is so powerful, linguistically and psychologically,
that it is used to invoke military courage,
to promote feelings of nationalism,
and even to justify war and atrocity.
The hypothetical omission of this one word by a president of the United States,
the failure to simply say "God bless America,"
would likely cause their public approval ratings to plummet.
Whatever your metaphysical beliefs are,
the literal fact is that the trajectories of lives and nations
swing on the hinge of this one word:
"God."
To think about God, either through construction or negation,
you have to deploy abstract reasoning.
The very principles that are intrinsically bound up
in any conceivable definition of the word "God"
include elements of mystery and unknowing.
These very types of abstract principles
are precisely what land us in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
I have to step back and think about this sometimes,
that we have inside the bones of our head
an electrical piece of meat
(Laughter)
that's generating abstract ideas about divine nature.
The nucleus accumbens is located a little bit lower in the brain,
in a region called the subcortex.
The subcortex is more ancient than the prefrontal cortex
in terms of the evolutionary time spans for its development.
The nucleus accumbens is the brains' pleasure center.
It helps positively reinforce environments and behaviors
that are rewarding to you
and that are beneficial to you.
I have to smile when I think about how in the New Testament,
when Jesus describes heavenly rewards,
we are illuminating the biological embodiment of these ancient metaphors.
When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior,
about being with their families for eternity,
in short, when they were thinking about their heavenly rewards
as they imagined them,
the brains and their bodies physically respond.
A classic hymn in the religious movement of Joseph Smith
describes the Spirit of God like a fire burning.
If you haven't ever felt it before,
it's actually a wonderful warm glow.
It makes you want to do good and be good.
It may be the emotion
that moral psychologist Jonathan Hite refers to as elevation.
The frontal attention regions
are probably acting in concert with the nucleus accumbens
in order to amplify the phenomenal content of this religious experience.
This so is an area where we will continue to do extended research
in order to better understand the dynamics of this neural system
as it interacts with religious psychology.
In addition to the biology that supports ecstatic religious experience,
we were also curious
about how social behavior is influenced by the brain on God.
One possibility that we considered is that perhaps our study participants
would demonstrate an in-group authority bias
if they were asked to compare
the teachings of their own religious leaders
with the teachings from other faith traditions.
We designed a spiritual quotation's task
in which participants were presented with a spiritual teaching,
and next to it,
with a picture of the person who made the statement.
They were then asked to rate how meaningful the teaching was
and also how strongly they felt the Spirit in response to that teaching.
Sources for these teachings
were either from an in-group religious authority figure,
in the case of our study, those included two Mormon apostles,
Diederich Dorf and Jeffrey Holland,
and the president of the LDS Church at the time of the study,
Thomas Monson.
The out-group religious figures
included Pope Francis, Desmond Tutu and Billy Graham,
three non-Mormon Christian leaders.
Because this was an experiment though,
we threw in a little bit of a twist.
It turns out that none of the teachings were from their attributed sources.
(Laughter)
We collected quotations from the writings of C.S. Lewis.
(Laughter) (Cheers)
He's sometimes referred to in Mormonism as a 13th apostle.
We randomized these teachings across all of the trials.
And we asked the participants to rank how meaningful they were,
how strongly they felt the Spirit,
and what we saw was so beautiful
from the point of view of cognitive science.
Believing Mormons consistently ranked the teachings of their own leaders
as more meaningful and as more spiritually evocative
than the teachings of out-group authority figures
even though in reality, they were all from the same source.
To further explore the way
that social behavior is influenced by the brain on God,
we had our participants complete this task twice:
once at the beginning of their study session,
and a second time, following a 30-minute period of prayer,
of scripture study and of religious devotion.
This now is the audience-participation moment.
It's always fun to see
what people guess the effects of feeling the Spirit are on social judgments.
So, option number one
is that after a 30-minute period of prayer and scripture study
that our participants became more biased against out-group authority figures.
Option two is that they became less biased and more generous.
And option three is that we saw no changes in the behavior that we were observing.
Now I want everybody to be really brave.
(Laughter)
Who thinks that option number one
was what we saw?
Okay.
Who thinks that option number two, a decrease in the bias, is what we saw?
Who thinks that option number three,
held case that there was no change in the behavior we observed?
And how about option four,
which is that you're too nervous to make a guess about religion publicly?
(Laughter)
What we saw is that after a 30-minute period of personal spiritual practice,
our study participants became more generous to the out-group.
They arranged their teachings as more meaningful
and reported to feel the Spirit more strongly from them
than they had at the beginning of the study session.
There are several possible mechanisms
that could be driving the behaviors that we observe.
It's very likely, for example,
that principals from the psychology of attachment theory
are participating in this authority bias.
There are also elements of classical conditioning that might be at play here.
Biologically speaking,
when dopamine is released through the brain,
it may be driving an increase in social openness.
As is most often the case in science,
the full story likely requires a complex map
with multiple layers of explanation.
Religion, in my mind,
shows a lot of similar features with sex.
The majority of adults do it,
they say that it brings meaning and pleasure into their lives,
and in spite of strident advocates for abstinence only,
people are going to do it.
(Laughter)
No matter how many people say, "Never be sexual,"
humans will be sexual.
No matter how many people say, "Never be religious,"
humans will be religious.
These are behaviors that spring from deep evolutionary needs.
What I advocate is not for science to focus its editorializing
on the eradication of religious behavior,
but rather, like safe sex,
on evidence-based best practices for how we can do religion safely and well.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Imagine a renewed partnership between the seminary and the academy
to articulate intelligent safe theology.
It could do a lot of good in a world that needs it.
We live in an exciting day of rapidly accelerating discovery.
What that means is the formation of radically disruptive ideas.
Interdisciplinary and convergent work are exponentially driving the pace
of our expanded self-understanding.
The hope that I would like to convey to you
is that by launching into a new era
of religious studies that incorporate the best tools of our scientific methods,
we may win the capacity to further enlighten our respective cultures
and to refine our religious traditions in ways that make them more worthy
of the divine nature that they claim to represent.
This is your brain on God.
Any questions?
(Applause)
Thank you.