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IS
PRAYER just another kind of friendly conversation? Yes,
says Uffe Schjødt, who used MRI to scan the brains of 20
devout Christians. "It's like talking to another human.
We found no evidence of anything mystical."
Schjødt, of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and
colleagues, asked volunteers to carry out two tasks
involving both religious and "secular" activities. In
the first task, they silently recited the Lord's Prayer,
then a nursery rhyme. Identical brain areas, typically
associated with rehearsal and repetition, were
activated.
In the second, they improvised personal prayers before
making requests to Santa Claus. Improvised prayers
triggered patterns that match those seen when people
communicate with each other, and activated circuitry
that is linked with the theory of mind an awareness that
other individuals have their own independent motivations
and intentions.
Two of the activated regions are thought to process
desire and consider how another individual - in this
case God - might react. Also activated were part of the
prefrontal cortex linked to the consideration of another
person's intentions, and an area thought to help access
memories of previous encounters with that person.
The prefrontal cortex is key to theory of mind.
Crucially, this area was inactive during the Santa Claus
task, suggesting volunteers viewed Santa as fictitious
but God as a real individual.
Previous studies have found that the prefrontal cortex
is not activated when people interact with inanimate
objects, such as a computer game. "The brain doesn't
activate these areas because they don't expect
reciprocity, nor find it necessary to think about the
computer's intentions," says Schjødt.
He says the results show people believe they are talking
to someone when they pray, an outcome that pleased both
atheists and Christians: "Atheists said it shows that
it's all an illusion," says Schjødt, while Christians
said it was evidence that God is real. Brain scans
reveal that people believe they are talking to someone
when they pray Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford
points out that the study proves neither: "This has
nothing to do with whether God exists or not, only with
subjects' beliefs about whether God exists.”
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