New research reveals intriguing links between brain damage and religious fundamentalism. Could specific brain areas influence our beliefs? Let's discuss the findings and their implications! #brainscience #neuroscience #psychology #sociology #religion #fundamentalism #fyp #braindamage #psychiatry

New studies show strong links between brain network damage and increased religious fundamentalism and this builds off of a 2017 story that broadly showed that brain damage is related to religious fundamentalism. The difference in the more modern study is that they wanted to find out exactly who what, when, where, why, and exactly what brain networks cause religious fundamentalism. This was a simple correlation of people with brain damage tend to be more religious. This one is a lot more complicated, identifying the specific areas of the brain and neural pathways where you can receive damage and greatly increase the probability that you will be a religious fundamentalist. So the study defines religious fundamentalism as a way of thinking and behaving characterized by a rigid adherence to religious doctrines that are seen as absolute and inherent and it's been linked to various cognitive traits such as authoritarianism, resistance to doubt, and lower complexity of thought. Now, we know that there's environmental factors, social factors, there's even genetic factors in our brain that predispose us to being religious or not. And we did have this old study about brain damage increasing that, but the scientists wanted to figure out exactly what areas of the brain caused this. So we're going to skip a lot here about how they conducted the study. They used a lot of Vietnam war veterans that had various brain injuries on parts of their brain. They gave them CT scans, they tested them on their religious fundamentalism scale, it's sort of like a little pamphlet you'll fill out in the office. And what they found is that certain areas of the brain, particularly in the right hemisphere, were associated with higher scores on the religious fundamentalism scale. Specifically, lesions affecting the right superior orbital frontal cortex, right middle frontal gyros, and right inferior periodal lobe, and the left cerebellum were all linked to increases in religious fundamentalism. And interestingly, they got a negative as well on this one, as it says,