“Religion appears to serve as a moral compass for the vast majority of people around the world. It informs whether same-sex marriage is love or sin, whether war is an act of security or of terror, and whether abortion rights represent personal liberty or permission to murder. Many religions are centered on a god (or gods) that has beliefs and intentions, with adherents encouraged to follow “God’s will” on everything from martyrdom to career planning to voting. Within these religious systems, how do people know what their god wills?”

Using fMRI, they saw that the same areas of the brain were used to reason about one’s own beliefs and God’s beliefs, but different regions of the brain were used when reasoning about another person’s beliefs. In particular, reasoning about God’s beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person’s beliefs.

In other words, if you believe in God, you’re probably subconsiously endowing God with your beliefs (at least on controversial issues*), and not the other way around.

They continue:

“People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

Perhaps those who believe that God lives within them would suppose that self-referential-type activation is evidence of God, inside them fiddling with their neurons, aligning their beliefs with his. This would be valid except for the fact that the controversial topics used in the study polarise Christians as well as non-Christians.

The New Scientist put it wryly: “God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour.”

Imagination
Of course, we are all convinced that our beliefs are true and not purely a function of our imagination. But whether a belief is true or not, religious belief does require imagination. This is because the “transendental social” – the ability to understand social roles and groups in an abstract way, which is necessary for religious expression – depends on imagination.

In other words, imagination is necessary for social life, and is naturally present in religious belief. That religious belief depends on imagination might seem a little unfair to persons of religious faith with a poor imagination. Can we blame their Creator for this?

Getting Rid of the Chaff
So whilst imagination is necessarily present in religious belief, how does one identify which of one’s own beliefs are just pure imagination – and not actually true? Can we tell if we’re projecting our beliefs onto God, as seen in the fMRI study above? This is hard to answer by self assessment because our desire to validate our world views and beliefs is very strong. To combat uncertainty and maintain control has long been considered a primary and fundamental motivating force in human life and one of the most important variables governing psychological well-being and physical health.

In cases where our beliefs are incorrect, we are quite likely to delude ourselves, to maintain a sense of control. We seek only information which supports our point of view (selective exposure), ignore information which does not support our view (selective attention), and perceive ambiguous information as being consistent with our view (selective interpretation). For example, Whitson and Galinsky tested whether lacking control increased the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. They reported (Science, 2008) that subjects saw images in noise, formed illusory correlations in stock market information, perceived conspiracies, and developed superstitions, to maintain control:

“Experiencing a loss of control led participants to desire more structure and to perceive illusory patterns. The need to be and feel in control is so strong that individuals will produce a pattern from noise to return the world to a predictable state.”

*The study used controversial subjects such as the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and abortion.

Neuromarketeers hope that as well as streamlining marketing processes, neuromarketing will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods. It is based on the assumption that you and I cannot fully articulate our preferences when asked to express them explicitly, and that our brains contain hidden information about our true preferences. Moreover, the link between expressed preference and whether we will actually buy the product is not always clear.

Today in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, authors Ariely and Berns review a number of applications of neuromarketing: food products, film and TV, architecture, and interestingly, political candidates.

Activation in different parts of the prefrontal cortex has been associated with subjects’ motivated reasoning, maintaining political preference in response to advertisements, and changing their political candidate preference. The paper states,

“In marketing terms, the political candidates are the products that must be sold to the electorate. Therefore, like other products, candidates and their campaigns have pre- and post-design phases. Political marketing is aimed at selling an existing candidate but, with more foresight, can also be used to ‘design’ a better candidate.”

They go on:

“Although potential nominees already go through a ‘grooming’ process, it is worth examining this prospect. A candidate’s appearance, trustworthiness and message content might determine a voter’s decision.”

I hope research continues, but into how to influence voter decisions on the basis of policy and message in spite of a candidate’s appearance.

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
[Ambrose Bierce, 1911]

Limerence describes an involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person—in other words, romantic love. Researchers in New York have shown, using functional MRI, that in some human individuals being “in love” with a long-term partner is similar to early-stage romantic love. But perhaps not in the way you might think.

Staying in love—retaining limerence—is not a matter of obsession, craving and euphoria. The euphoria may be useful in emotional bonding at first; in this respect, Ambrose Bierce is on the money. Oscar Wilde seems to agree:

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
[Oscar Wilde]

As Bierce and Wilde might have expected, activation in the nucleus accumbens—associated with craving and euphoria from other studies looking at response to cocaine—decreased in line with the number of years married.

So what about long term love? In long-term in-love individuals, activation in a different part of the brain was observed; the ventral tegmental area. This is an area associated with working for rewards, which also is activated in early-stage romantic love. In other words, romantic love can last. This area of the brain reflects positive reward prediction errors (reward unexpected and received).

The researchers go on to suggest that this activation may be a novelty signal; that part of maintaining the romantic love feeling is the maintenance of a novelty response to the partner.

But you and every Agony Aunt knew this already, right? Keep things fresh. Get out of routine. Now confirmed with fMRI.
 
 
Acevedo et al. Program No. 297.10/TT28. Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, 2008.
Acevedo and Aron, Rev. Gen. Psy. 13(1), Mar 2009, 59-65.
Aron et al, J Neurophysiol 94: 327-337, 2005.
Read more here.

“an indisputable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man.”
(Hamilton JA 1935. The association between brain size and maze ability in the white rat. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.)

Brain volumes can be measured accurately with MRI, and using MRI, research has shown that intelligence and brain volume are meaningfully related. The correlation is higher in adult women. Another study in elderly men showed that fluid intelligence, premorbid intelligence, and visuospatial memory are affected, but not verbal memory and verbal fluency.

It’s OK to be big-headed after all…

See a bee-brain at the Journal of Insect Science. The in-plane resolution of images reported is about 16μm x 16μm.

It seems that patterns of brain activity associated with planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward occur in both activities. Interestingly, these are also the regions of the brain (the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmentum) which “light up” in the early stages of a romantic relationship, when subjects profess strong feelings of romantic love. Did you miss that? Being in love is not an emotion! Romantic love is better characterised as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions such as euphoria or anxiety.

As relationships mature, emotional centres get involved (the insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex). Not surprisingly, this happens sooner in women than in men. Women also activate memory centres, and in the words of one editorial,

“suggesting perhaps that they pay more attention to past experience in this process. Men, by contrast, activate their visual areas early on and in the very diplomatic words of the study’s lead author they activate the “regions associated with penile turgidity”. Another way of describing the different gender responses would be ‘love’ versus ‘lust’. Isn’t science wonderful?”

Other unusual MRI studies include during-coitus imaging (in a 50cm scanner bore!), and even dynamic er… defecography, in which you would be able to clearly see where your chocolate ends up.

Chocolate has been the subject of MRI studies itself. The migration of lipids (fat) in aging chocolate and from chocolate fillings has been investigated using MRI. Chocolate manufacturers can’t have the pleasurable-reward bits of my brain missing out because of their chocolate getting old, now can they?!

More than 20% increase in prefrontal white matter, against both control groups, to be precise. The neurodevelopmental increase in white matter parallels developmental changes in the ability to lie (in children age 10 to 12 years). The researchers at the University of Southern California hypothesize that

“The relative reduction in prefrontal grey matter relative to white may also predispose to a general antisocial disinhibited tendency which, coupled with increased white matter, results in excessive lying.”

So take a closer look at your head images next time you volunteer for a research study.

Using the BOLD effect, Canadian researchers have shown that under these circumstances, many different regions of the brain are involved, which allowed certain online media to report that “nuns don’t have a single G-spot” (G for God, naturally). Very droll.

It gets better; the Economist noted that the nuns were, effectively, method acting.

The nuns warned the researchers that “God cannot be summoned at will”, and reported that, from a first-person perspective, the experiences lived during the original mystical condition (Unio Mystica) were different than those used to self-induce a mystical state. But the researchers believed that recall and reexperiencing of a state of union with a divine other was sufficiently mystical (or at the very least, the same brain regions would be activated).

I also was heartened to read that

“In addition, the subjects experienced a feeling of unconditional love during the Control condition.”

Read the article at Neuroscience Letters.