Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 13, Issue 8, Pages 1649-1652Publisher
BLACKWELL SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1046/j.0953-816x.2001.01527.x
Keywords
brain; human; neuroimaging; PET; religion
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The commonsense view of religious experience is that it is a preconceptual, immediate affective event. Work in philosophy and psychology, however, suggest that religious experience is an attributional cognitive phenomenon. Here the neural correlates of a religious experience are investigated using functional neuroimaging. During religious recitation, self-identified religious subjects activated a frontal-parietal circuit, composed of the dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal and medial parietal cortex. Prior studies indicate that these areas play a profound role in sustaining reflexive evaluation of thought. Thus, religious experience may be a cognitive process which, nonetheless, feels immediate.
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