Year: 2024
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Religious fundamentalism, characterized by rigid adherence to a set of beliefs putatively revealing inerrant truths, is ubiquitous across cultures and has a global impact on society. Understanding the psychological and neurobiological processes producing religious fundamentalism may inform a variety of scientific, sociological, and cultural questions. Research indicates that brain damage can alter religious fundamentalism. However, the precise brain regions involved with these changes remain unknown. Here, we analyzed brain lesions associated with varying levels of religious fundamentalism in two large datasets from independent laboratories. Lesions associated with greater fundamentalism were connected to a specific brain network with nodes in the right orbitofrontal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal lobes. This fundamentalism network was strongly right hemisphere lateralized and highly reproducible across the independent datasets (r = 0.82) with cross-validations between datasets. To explore the relationship of this network to lesions previously studied by our group, we tested for similarities to twenty-one lesion-induced conditions. Lesions associated with confabulation and criminal behavior showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with greater fundamentalism. Moreover, lesions associated with poststroke pain showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with lower fundamentalism. These findings are consistent with hemispheric specializations in reasoning and lend insight into previously observed epidemiological associations with fundamentalism, such as cognitive rigidity and outgroup hostility.
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, John Templeton Foundation, Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Brigham Young University, Northwestern University, Baylor University, Johns Hopkins University, Boston Scientific Corporation, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Hamline University, Templeton World Charity Foundation, Epilepsy Society, National Institutes of Health, Feinberg School of Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH Clinical Center
Awards: G1600126467, Targeted modulation of symptom-specific brain circuits with transcranial magnetic stimulation, NOVA Programming on the Cosmos, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition, G6099097669, Transdiagnostic memory, mood and motor circuits in Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative disease, Identifying neuromodulation targets for pain in the human brain, Predicting Cognitive Outcomes from Stroke Based on Lesion Location, Using Brain Lesions and Deep Brain Stimulation to Identify an Epilepsy Circuit, Toward Connectomic Deep Brain Stimulation in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, BRAIN CONNECTS: The center for Large-scale Imaging of Neural Circuits (LINC), Using human brain connectivity to identify the causal neuroanatomical substrate of depression symptoms
OpenAlex ID: W4401910836