NationStates Jolt Archive

An interesting study shows that religious people and non-religious people have distinct differences in their brains:

http://www.physorg.com/news155404273.html

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.

These correlations remained strong even after controlling for personality and cognitive ability, says Inzlicht, who also found that religious participants made fewer errors on the Stroop task than their non-believing counterparts.

from the linked article:

"You could think of this part of the brain like a cortical alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty," says lead author Inzlicht, who teaches and conducts research at the University of Toronto Scarborough. "We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They're much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error."


To sum it up, believers are happy and ignorant, the study says.

Meh.

I know some believers who aren't quite happy and hate ignorance.

To sum it up, believers are happy and ignorant, the study says.
They're not ignorant or less intelligent. In fact, they're greater degree of self-assurance under the conditions of the survey was apparently justified. As the study says, "The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God . . . the fewer errors they made."
This makes sense when you consider that the scientists used a Stroop Test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect). So someone with greater self-confidence and less of a tendency to get frustrated by their mistakes will be less distracted during the test and receive a higher score.

Someone should get Janeane Garafolo's opinion on this, she's apparently an expert on neuroscience and people's brains.

On the page with your article, there was a link to an article about circadian rythms that was also pretty interesting. http://www.physorg.com/news154025101.html