August 08, 2010

File this under... Duh...


Researchers have determined that thinking about God can help relieve anxiety associated with making mistakes. However, the finding only holds for people who believe in a God.

The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress response while participants made mistakes on a test.

Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn’t.

“Eighty-five percent of the world has some sort of religious beliefs,” says Michael Inzlicht, who cowrote the study with Alexa Tullett, both at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.

“I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they may serve.”

With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently—in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes.

Participants either wrote about religion or did a scrambled word task that included religion and God-related words.

Then the researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerized task—one that was chosen because it has a high rate of errors.

The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal and alerting us when things are going wrong.

Interestingly, atheists reacted differently. When they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress.

Not exactly a surprising result.

2 comments:

keeka said...

At a seminar I went to a year ago, there was a doctor that does the brain scans that show the 3d brain scan with all the different colors and holes and such. He mentioned that when people pray and meditate on God that they can physically change the way their brain is functioning. He showed a brain while praying and a brain under stress. Both were from the same person and had very different appearances. He also mentioned 3 sports you don't want to have your child in...Boxing, Soccer and Football. Most domestic violence cases where the male is the problem, they have played one of these sports to a certain degree. The right and left side of the head that is injured most with these sports is where the lobe is that controls anger etc. At least that is as much as I can remember. There may be some incorrect wording but the idea is there.

flyingvan said...

If there is a physiological difference, you could argue atheism is a mental disease. This goes a long way in explaining why many atheists put so much time, energy, even court cases towards something they say doesn't exist.