Religious Hardware of the Human Brain

Human brains increased in size for a number of reasons, such as the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size. Some parts of the brain, even while not themselves conferring advantages, may have gotten dragged along in the general brain size increase. These can be considered to be the mental hardware of religion. Here are some examples.

Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can make you feel that you have transcended out of your place on Earth (ex- means out of, stasis means place). Religions connect religious devotion to sex, for example in the overtly sexual imagery of the Song of Solomon or the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.

Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. Nearly everybody takes the awareness of his or her body for granted. Once in a while, a person experiences a certain kind of stroke in which parts of the left hemisphere are deprived of oxygen and fail to work while the right hemisphere continues to function. Neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor describes a stroke in which she had a feeling that she was not confined to her body, and that she was flowing through a stream of experience. Our brains take nerve impulses from every sensory organ—and these impulses are all the same—and sort them out into sound, color, pain, heat, cold, taste, smell, and orientation. That is, we detect light with our eyes, but we see with our brains; we detect airborne molecules with our noses, but we smell with our brains. Sight and smell are illusions created by the brain. Apparently the sense of being confined within a body is also something that the brain creates. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.

Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, one for which religion clearly provides an outlet.

The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this is a neotenous vestige of a child’s worship of parents. People continue to follow their charismatic religious leaders long after the leaders’ hypocrisies are revealed, and break themselves from this bond of devotion only after a great deal of anguish.

Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability to understand that you will die, and the possibility that you will be preoccupied by it.

Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them. The agent of wind or pain is invisible, but the children believe in the agents anyway.

Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. And in addition, there is the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience, which I discussed in a blog entry early last year (January 10, 2010), and which I will address in more detail later this year.

This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books.