The religious brain

Abstract

This paper is a critical review of anthropology and cognitive science that proposes social, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that convert culturally transmitted ideas into beliefs, discussed in relation to Geertz's classic definition of religion (‘Religion as a cultural system’, 1966). Literal and analogical uses of language, and a capacity for mentalizing thought, allow the creation of systems of symbols that vary between groups, contributing to the systematic group‐level differences that we refer to as ‘culture’. A combination of social referencing, mentalizing, and emotion perception enables enculturation to occur by attention to stable, repetitive conjunctions of meanings and emotions in the social environment, promoting the formation of cognitive‐affective schemata. In addition to informal enculturation in routine social interaction, cultural systems such as religions organize and protect transmission of valued knowledge. Religious rituals are culturally invented symbolic displays that transmit conceptions of the world and imbue them with emotional and motivational significance. Two kinds of ritual are distinguished: high frequency, low arousal rituals belonging to a ‘doctrinal’ religious mode, and low frequency, high arousal rituals belonging to an ‘imagistic’ religious mode (Whitehouse 2000). ‘Doctrinal’ rituals allow the extraction of semantic memories and associated emotions through repeated participation and exposure. ‘Imagistic’ rituals are particularly associated with intense emotion, episodic memory formation, and the formation of social ties. Religious rituals, especially imagistic rituals, employ two major strategies to convey conceptions of the world and invest them with a heightened sense of reality and emotion: (1) a ‘sensory’ route evokes salient thought and experience by orchestrating multiple reinforcing social–emotional signals and other stimuli, engaging attention, emotion, and arousal; (2) a ‘semantic’ route uses enigmatic verbal and non‐verbal symbols to engage an analogical/right hemispheric processing strategy to make sense of what is authoritatively presented as real but incompletely understood. Both routes are hypothesized to activate the mesolimbic dopamine system amongst other components of cognitive‐affective processing, so that the ‘moods and motivations’ evoked by the ritual performance seem ‘uniquely realistic’. These social, cognitive, and neural processes constitute ways in which religious ideas are turned into convictions.