No one knows why humanity felt its first religious stirrings, but researchers at the University of California at San Diego report that the human brain may be hard-wired to hear the voice of heaven, in what researchers said was the first effort to directly address the neural basis of religious expression.
In a provocative experiment with patients suffering from an unusual form of epilepsy, researchers at the school's brain and perception laboratory determined that the parts of the brain's temporal lobe - which the scientists quickly dubbed the "God module" - may affect how intensely a person responds to religious beliefs.
People suffering this type of seizure have long reported intense mystical and religious experiences as part of their attacks but also are unusually preoccupied with mystical thoughts between seizures. That led this team to use these patients as a way of investigating the relationship between the physical structure of the brain and spiritual experiences.
In a carefully designed experiment, the researchers determined that one effect of the patients' seizures was to strengthen their brain's involuntary response to religious words, leading the scientists to suggest that a portion of the brain was naturally attuned to ideas about a supreme being.
"It is not clear why such dedicated neural machinery . . . for religion may have evolved," the team reported Tuesday at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. One possibility, the scientists suggested, was to encourage tribe loyalty or reinforce kinship ties or the stability of a closely knit clan.
The scientists emphasized that their findings in no way suggest that religion is simply a matter of brain chemistry. "These studies do not in any way negate the validity of religious experience or God," the team cautioned. "They merely provide an explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved."
Until recently, most neuroscientists confined their inquiries to research aimed at alleviating the medical problems that affect the brain's health, and to attempts to fathom its fundamental neural mechanisms. Emboldened by their growing understanding of how the brain works, however, scientists now dare to investigate the relationship between the brain, human consciousness and a range of intangible mental experiences.