Gamma waves help meditation change the brain
Connor Wood Long-term meditators know that meditation can change people’s experience of the world, usually for the better. Highly experienced practitioners of meditation often report greater feelings...
View ArticleReligion may reduce anxiety response
Connor Wood You’ve felt it before: the embarrassed, self-conscious realization that you’ve just committed a major error, made a mistake when you should have been performing better. We all experience...
View ArticleHow much are your sacred values worth?
Connor Wood The best things in life can’t be bought…but everyone has his or her price. The age-old wisdom about values and money can be contradictory. Fortunately, new research from both sides of the...
View ArticleGod spot in the brain? More like God spots
Nicholas C. DiDonato Neurologists have long wondered whether a particular part of the brain can help explain a person’s experience of God. Stanley Koren and Michael Persinger, for example, famously...
View ArticleMuslim prayer may increase alpha waves in the brain
Connor Wood The religious brain is hot stuff right now. Publications as diverse as Science and Newsweek seem to be gaga about how meditation affects the frontal cortex, how praying soothes the...
View ArticleAre autistics less religious? Yes.
New research shows that autistics – and men! – may believe less in God because they think less about the world in personal terms.
View ArticleJournal articles on scientific study of religion available online this month
Taylor & Francis, the publisher of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, is making all articles free online for access and download through the month of February 2013.
View ArticleHow the brain escapes the self
Research from the University of Missouri shows that reduced functioning in the right parietal cortex is associated with high levels of spirituality – particularly forgiveness.
View ArticleThe neurology of spirit writing
Are spirit mediums for real? Who knows? But researchers in the US and Brazil have found that, real or not, certain mediums' brains act in some very interesting ways.
View ArticleRitual reduces life’s noise-to-signal ratio
Our world is filled with unspoken social conventions that transform messy, continuous information into clearer, binary data. Ritual is one of them. Anthropologist Roy Rappaport claimed that ritual, the...
View ArticleWhy Are There Atheists?
Certain aspects of personality orientation may naturally lead some people to religious belief and others to nonbelief; compared with religious believers atheists tend to be less social, more...
View ArticleWant to understand religion? You’ve gotta have a body.
Religious experience is something that comes from what bodies do. What goes on in our muscles, our guts, and on the surface of our skin actually matters. If you want to understand religion, or culture,...
View ArticleA new theory for why Buddhist meditation makes us feel good
Our brains build up stable patterns of activity over time, and these patterns may inhibit dopamine release - leading to depression and melancholy. Can samatha Buddhist meditation free us from our...
View ArticleHilbert problems in the study of religion
Journal editors at Religion, Brain & Behavior are calling for experts and researchers across religious studies and the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences to offer their suggestions...
View ArticleMusic and Dance in Human Evolution
Humans everywhere play music and dance. But other animals don't — so where did these unique abilities come from? New research provides some suggestions.
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