The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief
PLoS ONE September 30, 2009 Sam Harris, Jonas Kaplan, Ashley Curiel et al. 173 citations
Religious and nonreligious thinking activate different broad brain regions, but the neural difference between believing and disbelieving a statement is the same regardless of whether the content is religious or ordinary. This suggests that the brain's acceptance of statements as true or false operates through a content-independent mechanism, which may help explain how people come to accept any kind of statement as a valid description of the world.