Our God-Shaped Brains

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Speaker 1 This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Speaker 1 I recently visited Mexico City and paid a visit to the National Museum of Anthropology. In a series of chambers, the museum depicts the rise and fall of various cultures in Mexico's history.

Speaker 1 One thing that struck me was the staggering range of religious beliefs that rose to prominence and then faded away over the centuries.

Speaker 1 The Temple of the Feathered Serpent, for example, was a major religious center at Teotihuacan.

Speaker 1 Built around 2,000 years ago, the magnificent pyramid likely paid homage to a storm god.

Speaker 1 When archaeologists explored the structure, they found it concealed horrors.

Speaker 1 Among them, a series of skeletons bound at the wrists and laid symmetrically side by side, victims possibly sacrificed to soothe an angry deity.

Speaker 1 Sometime later, I came by an account of another storm god. This god, worshipped centuries earlier in ancient Greece, had a dramatic origin story.

Speaker 1 The Titan Kronos, the son of Uranus and Mother Earth, is believed to have castrated and deposed his father. Fearful that his children would do the same to him, he ate them.

Speaker 1 All except Zeus, who went on to overthrow him and become one of the most important gods of ancient Greece. Zeus had many powers, among them, the ability to control the weather.

Speaker 1 Around the world, we see a staggering range of religious faiths as well as similarities in beliefs in very different times and places.

Speaker 1 Given the ubiquity of these beliefs, psychologists have long speculated about how these beliefs shape and are shaped by the human mind.

Speaker 1 Today, we explore features in the brain that are intimately tied to our capacity for religious belief.

Speaker 1 We also look at how all of us, religious and non-religious people alike, can use this knowledge to find more meaning in our lives.

Speaker 1 God and the mind this week on Hidden Brain.

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Speaker 1 For centuries, the country of Lebanon prided itself on being a richly multicultural place. It was home to a multitude of ethnic and religious groups.

Speaker 1 Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Armenians, Druze and Jews, all living together.

Speaker 1 After it was occupied by the French, tourists affectionately nicknamed its capital Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, for its cafes, thriving universities, and robust art scene.

Speaker 1 Ara Norenzayan grew up in this multi-religious melting pot in the 1970s.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so my heritage is Armenian, so the Armenian community is a small and distinctive community in Lebanon. Armenians have always been very connected to their history and

Speaker 3 in particular the Armenian Apostolic Church, which dates back to the 4th century. So it's one of the oldest living churches on the planet, so 1700 years of history.

Speaker 3 That was also part of how I grew up,

Speaker 3 and I was also engaging with that and trying to make sense of it as well.

Speaker 1 As a young child, Ara served as an altar boy in his church. He mostly attended Mass because his father made him, following the ancient global tradition of children reluctantly obeying their parents.

Speaker 1 He felt like a fly on the wall, observing the choreographed rituals that his community had performed for hundreds of years.

Speaker 1 He watched his fellow parishioners as they burned incense, said the Lord's Prayer, and took Holy Communion.

Speaker 1 Easter each year was a time of high drama in Beirut.

Speaker 3 I do remember seeing some processions.

Speaker 3 in the neighborhoods where I grew up, where during Easter, for example, there would be like dramatic theatrical displays of religiosity.

Speaker 3 For example, in some of the Catholic areas, you would see that would reenact the crucifixion of Jesus.

Speaker 3 And people really felt enraptured by these experiences.

Speaker 3 Someone who would

Speaker 3 play the role of Christ and would carry the cross and there would be people who were, you know, reenacting the, you know, the Roman soldiers, the whole

Speaker 3 story of how Jesus was crucified. In many communities, this is done

Speaker 3 even today,

Speaker 3 and it can be very emotional and very powerful.

Speaker 1 Ara witnessed firsthand how faith ordered the world around him. Growing up in Lebanon, friends mostly belonged to the same religious communities.
Holidays centered on religious festivals.

Speaker 1 ID cards listed people's religions.

Speaker 1 In 1975, a civil war broke out and the multicultural bonds that kept the Lebanese people together came apart.

Speaker 1 The conflict initially pitted Christians against Muslims, but it quickly escalated and swallowed every group in the country. The Beirut that Ara knew splintered in half.

Speaker 3 We had difficulty crossing the green line that it was cold.

Speaker 3 Beirut was divided into East Beirut and West Beirut. I lived in East Beirut, which was predominantly Christian.
West Beirut was predominantly Muslim, but not entirely.

Speaker 3 It was still a very diverse place in both sides.

Speaker 3 Our school was in West Beirut. My elementary school that I went to initially was in West Beirut.
And we lived in East Beirut. I mean, the distances are not great.

Speaker 3 We're talking about like maybe five, ten kilometers at most.

Speaker 3 But the division was quite stark and I do remember that crossing that line became dangerous.

Speaker 3 There were snipers, there were bombs, sporadically schools would close. I remember my dad in the mornings would listen to the radio to find out if it was safe for us to go to school.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 It was terrifying and I do remember that they were very worried, but they also wanted us to go to school.

Speaker 3 And we still had a life in the city and sometimes we had to go and see friends or meet people so it was a tough calculation

Speaker 3 people could find sometimes figure out places where it was safer to cross than others but it also depended on the time and you know the the rumors about where the snipers are so it was really uh it does sound really remarkably dangerous but it was part of our lives and we had to adapt to the circumstances.

Speaker 3 We couldn't just haul up in our home and stay and not go outside. We had to live.

Speaker 1 Did you see any of this firsthand? I mean, obviously, it was all around you, the news was all around you, but how close did you actually get to the violence? Did it reach your block, your home?

Speaker 3 It varied,

Speaker 3 and there were sporadic fighting when the civil war broke out, but eventually we we were and in two different ways. One was

Speaker 3 when there was fighting going on between the different militias

Speaker 3 and we would have to go in an underground shelter. It was actually an underground parking lot and we would just stay there until the fighting would stop.

Speaker 3 A second one was more terrorism.

Speaker 3 One time I do remember we were in a living room of our apartment where we lived, and all of a sudden, a bomb exploded just outside of the building, and the shards of the bomb spread all over the building, and it hit our kitchen.

Speaker 3 And luckily, no one was in the kitchen. If there was someone in the kitchen, I would have been injured or died.

Speaker 1 Ara realized he was seeing another side of religion. The beliefs that his family, his friends, and community shared now mark friend from foe.
Faith spilled over into fanaticism and fear.

Speaker 3 There was a friend of mine who I played soccer with and

Speaker 3 his school bus was going to drop him off after school and passed by an area where there was a car bomb that exploded and the whole bus burned down.

Speaker 3 It was really gut-wrenching and tragic.

Speaker 3 And I was just told that, you know, your friend died.

Speaker 3 So that was really

Speaker 3 a very difficult time.

Speaker 1 I'm curious how your parents explained what was going on to you. Did you have questions for them? Did they try and explain what was going on to you?

Speaker 3 They tried, although they didn't know themselves. You know, it was so chaotic.

Speaker 3 You know, the trigger for the war was that there's this Christian militia that attacked the Palestinian bus that then spiraled into a fight between Christian militias and Palestinian militias.

Speaker 3 But then the war widened into more like a Christian versus Muslim war.

Speaker 3 But then it degenerated into even more chaos where militias within these religious communities were fighting against each other and allying with each other. So at some point it made no sense anymore.

Speaker 3 It was just chaos. And so it was really hard.
They really struggled to explain what was going on. And one thing that I remember, it was really struck me as

Speaker 3 a young person growing up there was how fragile society was around me.

Speaker 3 I could see how easily these social institutions that we rely on could just break down, you know, if without enough trust, without enough social solidarity and connections across different ethnic and religious lines, everybody withdrew into their tribal communities and from there it was just spiraled out of control.

Speaker 1 I'm wondering what you started to notice about religious beliefs.

Speaker 1 One of the things you mentioned to me a moment ago was that people essentially retreated into their religious enclaves as the conflict started to spiral, that they found in some ways either comfort or security in being among others who were like themselves.

Speaker 1 Did you notice other things about people's religious attitudes and beliefs as the war dragged on?

Speaker 3 I did notice that people were very passionate about their religious identities and so that was something that it was always on my mind

Speaker 3 to watch how

Speaker 3 these religious communities that otherwise are quite similar in the large scheme of things had very strong identities that divided them.

Speaker 3 I also saw that people would take refuge in the religious beliefs and practices as a way of shielding themselves from the suffering that was happening around them.

Speaker 3 I do remember that

Speaker 3 even though arguably the civil war was not a religious war, people were not fighting because of theological disputes or anything like that, but religion became implicated very quickly.

Speaker 3 So you could see a lot of religious symbolism.

Speaker 3 You know, the militia members would have their crosses and on the Christian side and their

Speaker 3 Muslim symbolism in the other side. And so that made me also think about why is this so

Speaker 3 important enough that people are using it as a way of

Speaker 3 identifying with it in opposition to someone who is different from them.

Speaker 1 As you can see, young Ara had the makings of a social scientist. Even amid the chaos of the Civil War, he was busy observing things, wondering why people believed what they believed.

Speaker 1 In time, after his family moved to the United States, Ara became a psychologist who studied the very questions he had wrestled with as a small boy.

Speaker 1 How did people come to their religious beliefs? Why did they believe what they believed? What are the features of the human mind that make possible our immense capacity for faith?

Speaker 1 You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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Speaker 3 This is Hidden Brain.

Speaker 1 I'm Shankar Vedanta. Ara Nuran Zayan is a psychologist at the University of British Columbia.
He has long sought to understand how the human mind appears to be designed for religious faith.

Speaker 1 Over the course of many years, years, Ara and other researchers have explored the evolution of religion and why different religions have risen and fallen during the long march of human history.

Speaker 1 We explored some of these ideas in an earlier episode of Hidden Brain. It was called Creating God, and it featured one of Ara's collaborators, Azim Sharif.

Speaker 1 In a different line of research, Ara has also thought deeply about the features in the human mind that make religious belief possible.

Speaker 3 Our mental architecture plays a really big role in the way that we entertain religious beliefs and practices around the world in predictable ways.

Speaker 1 One of these, he says, is our ability to see human-like qualities in non-human entities.

Speaker 3 So there's this tendency to project human features to the natural world. This capacity to anthropomorphize is a very

Speaker 3 big part of our the way our brains function and historically goes back to ancestral humans trying to make sense of the natural world.

Speaker 3 When they saw faces in the clouds or heard voices in the winds, they were anthropomorphizing.

Speaker 3 And one of the reasons why this is such an important part of the human brain is that it helps us also not only understand but also predict how things work because one of the more important parts of how we understand the world is our social interactions with our humans.

Speaker 1 From our earliest days on the planet, humans relied relied on one another for help, for protection, for community.

Speaker 1 Humans who were skilled at social interaction, at reading the intentions and minds of fellow humans, had an edge.

Speaker 1 They became more likely to survive and pass on their genes and their skills to their descendants.

Speaker 1 Once natural selection rewarded the capacity to infer the aims of other humans, this skill began to be used in other ways.

Speaker 1 Humans started to see signs of intention and agency, not just in each other, but everywhere.

Speaker 3 You imbue the world, the natural world, with these kinds of spirits.

Speaker 3 Mountains have spirits and rivers can have these agentic qualities.

Speaker 3 Natural events like hurricanes or earthquakes evoke also these kinds of agentic understanding of the world.

Speaker 3 And then from there, it's a small step to then understand or conceptualize gods or spirits as being separate, but controlling these events. So that's probably the next stage of

Speaker 3 our religious evolution.

Speaker 3 There is tremendous diversity in the way that people understand their gods and spirits and other supernatural beings.

Speaker 3 But one thing that seems to be quite common around the world and throughout history is that

Speaker 3 these gods and spirits have human-like qualities.

Speaker 3 In some cultures and traditions, it could even be physical human-like qualities. They could have bodies, and for example, many Hindu gods have that.

Speaker 3 But also, even if they don't have physical qualities, they surely have mental qualities that are human-like, and that is even more common around the world.

Speaker 3 Which, again,

Speaker 3 verifies this idea that our anthropomorphic tendencies feature prominently in the way that our religious mind operates.

Speaker 1 In the Judeo-Christian Bible, for example, God is empathetic but also hot-tempered, merciful but judgmental, loving and also jealous.

Speaker 1 In other words, very human-like.

Speaker 1 The Bible actually explicitly addresses this question by saying that God created humans in his own image.

Speaker 1 One way that Ara and other scholars have explored the cognitive architecture of religious belief is by studying the contrast between theological doctrines, the way holy books talk about religion, from the way ordinary believers practice their faith.

Speaker 3 Theological doctrines can be quite

Speaker 3 complex and in some ways counterintuitive.

Speaker 3 But sometimes we find this disconnect between the way that people

Speaker 3 think about their religious beliefs and the way that their theological doctrines say that they should think about their religious beliefs. It's not always a one-on-one correspondence.

Speaker 3 Sometimes this is half-jokingly called theological incorrectness, right?

Speaker 3 So for example, in the Abrahamic traditions, particularly in Islam and some parts of Christianity, God should not be thought of as a person.

Speaker 3 God is an abstract force. But many believers can't help but think about God as a person-like being that they can interact with, they can pray to, they can ask for forgiveness or advice, etc.

Speaker 3 So it's very much like a human-like being with extra powers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's also what allows us now to say, I have a personal relationship with God, for example. And that personal relationship is not with some abstract entity.

Speaker 1 It's with an entity that really has very human-like capabilities.

Speaker 3 Yes, that's correct.

Speaker 3 In many of the studies that we have done and others' work as well, we find that to the extent that people believe in more of a personal God, they seem to be more religiously committed.

Speaker 3 Seems like one interpretation of that is that

Speaker 3 the more we entertain God as a personal-like being, the more easier it is to then be religiously involved.

Speaker 3 And conversely, an abstract God, it's possible to think about it as that way, and people do think about it that way, but that doesn't make it very compelling to then engage with such a God.

Speaker 3 There's this one amusing example that was happening in the 1990s, I believe, in Nashville, Tennessee, where

Speaker 3 a cinnamon bun

Speaker 3 was identified as being the likeness of Mara Teresa.

Speaker 5 Excited customers are making pilgrimages to the Bunga Java coffee house to see the marvel enshrined in a counter display.

Speaker 5 The shop's manager said a customer was about to bite into the bun when he noticed its remarkable likeness to Mother Teresa's face.

Speaker 3 When I teach about anthropomorphism,

Speaker 3 I show this to my students because it's so fascinating that even a cinnamon bun becomes an object of worship and a pilgrimage site as long as it has some anthropomorphic qualities.

Speaker 3 And that's what happened in this case. It became a very popular destination.
Thousands of people started to go there to see the cinnamon bun, which was placed under a secure glass box.

Speaker 3 It was a big phenomenon at the time.

Speaker 1 Where do you think our capacity or our drive to anthropomorphize the world comes from? Why would we have such a feature in the mind?

Speaker 3 There are interesting theories about that in psychology. The sense of control is an important element of anthropomorphism.

Speaker 3 In the sense that when we think of something as having agentic qualities, we feel like we can control it, we can understand it better.

Speaker 3 If an earthquake is just a random earthquake and there's no sense to it, it's very hard to understand. It's also very hard to then figure out what to do.

Speaker 3 On the other hand, if an earthquake is caused by an evil spirit or by God,

Speaker 3 then it's understandable for our minds. And also, it tells us what to do.
Maybe appease the gods. Maybe negotiate with the spirits.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so in other words, you have an angry God, but maybe I will make a sacrifice that basically appeases the angry God.

Speaker 1 And I suppose you could argue that it's safer almost to assume that things have agency than to assume that things don't have agency.

Speaker 1 It's a problem in some ways if you don't realize that someone in fact has an agenda that could hurt you. And in some ways, there's less of a downside in seeing agency where none exists.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Our threats and how we detect threats in the world, there's a profound asymmetry in the sense that it's better to err on the side of seeing something that's not there than not seeing a threat that actually exists.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 if you mistake a rope for a snake,

Speaker 3 the worst thing is that you're scared for a second and then you just move on with your life. But if there is an actual snake and you mistake it for a rope, you might be dead.

Speaker 3 So, our ancestors, according to this argument, developed an asymmetric threat detection system where it's better to be trigger happy, it's better to, as they say, shoot and ask questions later, rather than the other way around.

Speaker 1 Another facet of the mind that you and others have explored has to do with a concept called dualism. Explain what this idea is, Ara, and how it affects our capacity for religious belief.

Speaker 3 Dualism is the capacity that we have in our minds that allow us to entertain that mind stuff can be distinct and separate from physical stuff.

Speaker 3 And once our brains can do that, we can have spirits without bodies, we can have gods who are everywhere and are not tied to a particular physical property, we can entertain the ideas of spirits or gods or other kinds of supernatural agents that can operate and exist and even survive the death of a physical body.

Speaker 3 Without this dualistic understanding, religious ideas would be incomprehensible.

Speaker 1 Dualism comes so easily to us that it can be difficult to even notice it. Our minds feel different than our our bodies.

Speaker 1 If we were to imagine losing an arm, for example, we wouldn't imagine some version of our arm would continue to exist outside of our body.

Speaker 1 But when we imagine our brains ceasing to function, we say, some version of our minds, our spirit, our identity, our consciousness, will surely endure.

Speaker 1 This idea lies at the heart of dualistic thinking and extends to how we think about God.

Speaker 3 You see this in the Abrahamic faiths, of course, where God is

Speaker 3 a spiritual entity that is not tied to any physical or temporal features.

Speaker 3 But you even see it in, for example, in ideas of reincarnation in the karmic faiths, in Hinduism and Buddhism, where you have to have some kind of a spiritual entity of the person to survive the physical body and then get reborn in a new body.

Speaker 3 One of the most fascinating examples of dualism at the heart of some really important religious institution is the way that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition picks a Dalai Lama after

Speaker 3 the current one is deceased. So when a Dalai Lama that's the head of the institution passes away, then one of the children that were born around the time when the Dalai Lama

Speaker 3 died is receiving the spirit of the deceased Dalai Lama. So then the institution has to find the correct child that will become the next Dalai Lama.

Speaker 3 And then people look at signs and premonitions to see where to look. But at the heart of this institution and this practice is the understanding that something survives the physical body's demise.

Speaker 3 There are different names for this. Different cultures have different words for it.
It could be spirit, soul, whatever.

Speaker 3 But there is some entity that survives the the death of the physical body which then is transferred to a

Speaker 1 newborn child so that the spirit is reborn and becomes a new dalai lama hmm why do you think our minds come with this capacity this ability to detach uh minds from other kinds of physical objects

Speaker 3 scientists who work on this question

Speaker 3 disagree on where the origins of this ability is and frankly we don't know for sure how it arises. But one theory is that it's a byproduct of the way other parts of our minds work.

Speaker 3 So, we talked about how our minds are very quick to infer agency, even when it's not there.

Speaker 3 So, once we are able to have this kind of ability to infer and attribute mind to the world, then it's a small step from there to also entertain the possibility that this mind stuff can arise and survive and operate without physical connection to the world.

Speaker 3 We see this most strikingly in the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where there is a very clear understanding that God or angels or even the devil, these are entities that are mental beings without necessarily having physical bodies.

Speaker 1 Another facet of the human mind that you and others have studied is our tendency to ascribe purpose to things. Talk about this idea and how it might be connected to religious faith.

Speaker 3 We talked about agency and anthropomorphism. We talked about dualism as some of the cognitive pillars of our cognitive religious architecture.
But another one is what's called teleological thinking.

Speaker 3 And teleological thinking is just a fancy word for saying that we often see purpose in the world, even when none exists.

Speaker 3 For some things in the world it makes sense to think of them as things that were designed with a purpose like a hammer was designed by humans for hammering. There's a purpose to it.

Speaker 3 But sometimes people say things like mountains are for climbing which is again the purpose doesn't fit with our scientific understanding of how the world is.

Speaker 3 Mountains weren't designed so that people can climb them. But young children often do that, and even sometimes adults think that way.

Speaker 3 So the thing, Shankar, is that our brains are very bad at understanding randomness.

Speaker 3 We just struggle with it. If you ask people to, you know, generate random numbers, people can't do it.
There will always be a pattern in the numbers that they generate.

Speaker 3 It's very compelling for people to look at something that looks random, like random patterns

Speaker 3 on a wall or natural events that don't seem to have any particular logic to them, and people still infer

Speaker 3 some meaning and design. And once people do that, it's again a very small step to think of that design as being designed by someone with a purpose in mind.

Speaker 3 So again, that links up with many of our religious beliefs that say, well, there's an agent behind this that designed the thing. It's not a random process.

Speaker 1 So in in other words, if we now have a year where there is very little rain and

Speaker 1 you have a drought, what we could say is that this drought has happened just because of natural forces and precipitation and temperature and pressure.

Speaker 1 And in fact, these are all just random things that are moving around, and we ended up with a drought this year.

Speaker 1 But it does offer a greater sense of control or a handle on the situation to say, you know, maybe we did something bad this past year, and the storm or the drought or the famine is retribution for our actions.

Speaker 1 It might still make us feel helpless, but perhaps it gives us the sense that next year, if we don't do the bad thing, maybe the bad thing won't happen.

Speaker 3 Yes, it then brings these natural events into the realm of our social interactions. In the same way that if I upset someone importantly in my life, they might retribute.

Speaker 3 And as a result, and I have to understand that and also make amends, right?

Speaker 3 In the same way, bad harvests could be seen that way and gives us an actionable actionable way of understanding the issue and also do something about it.

Speaker 1 While the links between religious beliefs and the cognitive architecture of the brain make sense, Ara acknowledges there is another explanation for religious beliefs.

Speaker 1 Think back to Ara's own childhood in Lebanon. He didn't sit down and come up with all the rituals and traditions of his community because of the cognitive architecture of his own brain.

Speaker 1 No, most of those beliefs came from his parents and community. They came from his culture.

Speaker 1 Ara says it may be best to think of the cognitive architecture of the brain as working in concert with cultural traditions.

Speaker 3 We have to have the cognitive tendencies to make religion possible, but also we are a cultural species.

Speaker 3 And as a cultural species, we are highly, highly receptive to cultural input, to what people believe around us, to what our elders say they believe in.

Speaker 3 And there is quite a bit of evidence that also this cultural input matters a great deal.

Speaker 3 And many of the religious beliefs that we entertain are particular religious beliefs that we are acquiring culturally that are fitting nicely with our cognitions, but nevertheless they're culturally transmitted.

Speaker 3 There's this very nice

Speaker 3 study by Will Gervais and Maxine Najle,

Speaker 3 where they looked at evidence of belief in God across many countries and with very large samples of hundreds of thousands of people. And what they wanted to see is what explains belief in God.

Speaker 3 So belief in God can vary from very low in some countries where majority don't believe in God, places like Denmark or the Czech Republic, and places where it's almost 100%.

Speaker 3 right like Pakistan or Nigeria.

Speaker 3 And what they looked at was the country of birth where the participants were. Is it a religious country, majority religious country?

Speaker 3 And they looked at whether or not the older people in this country were more religious than the younger people. And what they found was that if you move from societies that are majority not religious

Speaker 3 and don't have a big generation gap in their country, to countries where the opposite is true. So it's a majority religious country and the elders are religious more than the younger people.

Speaker 3 You go from 50% belief in God to almost 99%.

Speaker 1 To put this another way, people often learn religion through social influence. The older people in a society pass down their faith traditions to the next generation.

Speaker 1 That's why, even if the brain of someone in Pakistan is no different than the brain of someone in Denmark, a Pakistani is much more likely to be religious than a Dane.

Speaker 3 So that's entirely attributable to culture. That's cultural learning, right?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 you could have dualistic intuitions, you could have agency detection, you could see purpose in the world where none exists, but you may not necessarily develop the elaborate belief in something like a god without the proper cultural input.

Speaker 3 So these things are, I think, like lock and key. They fit each other and complement each other.

Speaker 1 These insights about how our minds and our cultures work together to create belief come at a time of growing atheism. About one in five people in the US now say they are irreligious.

Speaker 1 Social scientists who study the cognitive architecture of religion have asked if the rise of atheism in many countries poses a problem for our well-being.

Speaker 1 If our minds are so well suited for faith, what happens when many people choose disbelief?

Speaker 1 You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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Speaker 1 This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Speaker 1 At the University of British Columbia, psychologist Ara Noranzayan studies how the cognitive makeup of the mind shapes our capacity capacity for religious belief.

Speaker 1 He's also increasingly interested in the effects of religious faith on our minds. A variety of studies, he says, show that religious faith can help our well-being.

Speaker 3 There is a link between religion and happiness and well-being.

Speaker 3 There are earthly benefits to religion on this planet Earth, and that's why religion has survived as an important feature of human societies for as long as we know.

Speaker 1 There's also been research that looks at income levels around the world and happiness levels around the world.

Speaker 1 And with some nuances, I think it's fair to say that richer countries in general tend to be happier than poorer countries. And there are some ceiling effects and floor effects.

Speaker 1 But in general, it's better off to be rich than it is to be poor. And perhaps that's not a surprising finding.

Speaker 1 But it's also the case that richer countries tend to be less religious than poorer countries. And that seems to now elicit a paradox here.

Speaker 3 It is a paradox. So, the paradox is that if we look at countries and their happiness levels, the happiest countries are the least religious countries.
However,

Speaker 3 individuals, at least in religious societies, they tend to be happier. So, how is this possible?

Speaker 3 The explanation that I think is the most compelling is that as societies become wealthier, they become existentially more secure. And as a result,

Speaker 3 people have more predictable and safer lives. As a result, people become less religious.
The religion declines in wealthy countries. We know this.
We've known this for decades.

Speaker 3 There's a very powerful effect of country-level income on religious levels. Religious declines as income goes up.

Speaker 3 So that's one thing to keep in mind.

Speaker 3 The other thing that makes sense is that in places that don't have these features, life is not existentially secure, where there are high levels of poverty, infant mortality, income inequality levels, social safety nets are virtually absent.

Speaker 3 These are the conditions where religious beliefs and practices seem to give people the most benefit.

Speaker 3 So this is when and where people turn to religion to deal with these difficulties and the suffering that these conditions elicit.

Speaker 1 So, in other words, if you're a poor person and a religious person, you might be better off in a poor country rather than in a rich country?

Speaker 3 It is. That is the case.
This is a evidence from a large-scale study by Jana Berkessel and Jochen Gebauer and their colleagues, where they looked at precisely this paradox.

Speaker 3 The paradox that they were trying to explain was that you find that in wealthy countries, people who are struggling economically are less happy and

Speaker 3 have less well-being than people who are struggling economically in poor countries.

Speaker 3 You would expect, intuitively, that in wealthier countries, people who are struggling should be better off because they're in a wealthier country overall. But that's not the case.

Speaker 3 And the explanation that they explored, of course, was that in wealthier countries, religiosity declines, so religion is not as available

Speaker 3 as a way of coping and

Speaker 3 responding to life's adversities. But in poorer countries, income levels are lower and people remain religious, and people turn to religion when they're struggling, and they get these benefits from

Speaker 3 their religious involvement.

Speaker 1 There's been a fair amount of work that's been done on the subject of meaning, not just happiness, but meaning.

Speaker 1 Talk about the three components to meaning that in fact psychologists have identified and religion might play a role in shaping how all those three things work in the mind.

Speaker 1 Explain what those are, Ara.

Speaker 3 When we unpack what we mean by meaning, psychologically speaking, it kind of makes sense why religion

Speaker 3 since time immemorial has given people a meaning boost.

Speaker 3 So here is the idea. One model says that there are three components to meaning.

Speaker 3 One component is coherence. So is my life coherent? Can I tell a story about my life that where I say my life makes sense.
Here is how it unfolds. Here is what happened.

Speaker 3 The second

Speaker 3 important component is significance or mattering. So do I feel like my life matters to me and to others? Then I can have more meaning in my life.

Speaker 3 And the third component is purpose. Can I live my life with a purpose? Do I feel like I am living my life with some kind of a passion or a purpose? And the purpose can be anything, right?

Speaker 3 It could be raising a family, it could be a career choice, it could be friends, it could be a hobby.

Speaker 3 So coherence, significance, and purpose together comprise the sense of meaning we have in our lives. And we can

Speaker 3 see how, in all cases religion can provide people meaning so in the case of coherence

Speaker 3 people's religious worldviews give them a coherent understanding of the world and

Speaker 3 also religious traditions tell people you matter

Speaker 3 God loves you and you matter or or that this is all happening for a reason and for there's a purpose to everything. Things are not chaotic.

Speaker 3 So all of these are important elements that religion provides. And it makes sense because the religions that have been around and survived the test of time are the ones that have done this well.

Speaker 3 The ones that didn't do this well are not around anymore. So that's an important thing to think about.

Speaker 1 When you look at markers of mental health in different countries, you see something very strange. Rich countries report higher happiness levels, but they also report more mental health issues.

Speaker 1 Scandinavian countries, which have some of the highest reported happiness levels in the world, also have high levels of mental distress and suicide.

Speaker 1 Ara says the effects that religion has on happiness and meaning might be the key that unlocks this puzzle.

Speaker 3 Meaning and happiness are interesting because they are related, but also distinct. It's not the same thing to say I have meaning in life and say I'm happy.

Speaker 3 And the reason we know that's not the same thing is because when life circumstances are not easy, when people are facing a lot of difficulties and suffering as a result of poverty or economic inequality, natural disasters.

Speaker 3 What you find is that people can have meaning in life if they can turn to some source of meaning like religion or other things,

Speaker 3 but they wouldn't be happy. So you can't have meaning without being happy.
And presumably, it's the opposite also true.

Speaker 3 So I'm writing a book on the decline of religion where I'm exploring the idea of affluenza. So affluenza is this interesting phenomenon of wealthy societies that are not religious but also

Speaker 3 there is this feeling of sense of loss of meaning.

Speaker 3 But these are also the same societies that are also quite happy. So they score high on happiness levels, but they score low on meaning levels.

Speaker 3 And again, it seems like religion is the underlying mechanism here, underlying factor.

Speaker 3 People get a lot of meaning from religion, and when religious declines, meaning levels decline as well.

Speaker 1 What do you think people who are both religious and non-religious can do to gain some of the benefits that we've been talking about here?

Speaker 1 So, in other words, if we buy the idea that there are certain elements of the cognitive architecture of the mind that lend itself to religious beliefs, and yet as societies get wealthier or as people no longer have uncertainty in their lives, their religious beliefs tend to fall away.

Speaker 1 They still have, in some ways, the same cognitive architecture. Blaise Pascal is also supposed to have said

Speaker 1 that we all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. And the idea is that there's something in us that is basically yearning for connection with the divine.

Speaker 1 If people are non-religious, or if people are religious, are there ways that they can better take advantage of what we understand to be the benefits of religion?

Speaker 3 I think so.

Speaker 3 And this is one reason why understanding and studying religion and how it works and what kind of benefits it gives people can help us to find ways to enrich our lives so that we can live better lives.

Speaker 3 There's a science of happiness that also can give us a lot of good tips about what to do, but in connection with understanding, better understanding of how religions work.

Speaker 3 One of them is strong social connections.

Speaker 3 that can have powerful benefits to our well-being. And religions that have done that since millennia, does it have to be a religious community? Not necessarily.

Speaker 3 It could be any community that provides healthy and valuable connections to people. The second one, we talked about meaning.

Speaker 3 And one of the interesting things that comes out of the scientific literature on meaning is that the sources of meaning can vary widely for different people.

Speaker 3 So religion is a time-tested, powerful source of meaning, no question about that. But it's not the only thing.
It could be a passion,

Speaker 3 a cause, it could be family, friends, it could be career choices. And this is something that I think our society should think about more.

Speaker 3 How can we enrich our lives with more meaning so that we can raise the bar on our well-being in places where people have felt like there's more of a decline in meaning?

Speaker 1 Another area of life that some non-religious people turn to in search of meaning are what Ara calls mystical experiences.

Speaker 3 People who said, I have mystical experiences, seemed to be happier and more, had higher well-being.

Speaker 3 And I want to emphasize that, you know, mystical experiences can happen in religious contexts, but they don't have to be.

Speaker 3 There's nothing incompatible with being an atheist or non-religious person and having mystical experiences.

Speaker 3 If you're on a mountaintop and you feel awe and you feel a feeling of oneness with nature, that's a mystical experience and can be powerful. If you feel like your self dissolves through

Speaker 3 some experience like experimenting with psychedelics or meditation, that seems to give people a lot of serenity and a powerful feeling of well-being.

Speaker 1 I understand that you went on a meditation retreat. I think this might have been a long meditation retreat.
And you had sort of something of a mystical experience while you were on the retreat.

Speaker 1 I'm wondering if you can just tell me the story of what happened, Dara.

Speaker 3 I was at the retreat for a week, silent retreat, and

Speaker 3 initially it was quite a struggle to settle in to the experience, but eventually, after a few days, I was settled in, and there was a lot of turbulence, of course, like many people experience.

Speaker 3 It's not never a simple linear process, but there was a point where my mind really calmed,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 I felt like this emptiness inside me that was so overwhelmingly beautiful,

Speaker 3 it's as if I had become one with everything around me.

Speaker 3 So there's a stillness,

Speaker 3 calmness, openness, this transparency, as if it's like the world and me had become one. And in that moment, it was just blissful.

Speaker 3 And I wish I could stay in that place. I couldn't, of course, because I have a human brain, but I could see that it's there and it's attainable.

Speaker 3 And I think many people would relate to this: that this is a practice. Whatever you do, there are times when you can have that experience, and it's a place to savor and

Speaker 3 be grateful about.

Speaker 1 Ara Nuran Zayan is a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.

Speaker 1 Ara, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Speaker 3 It's a pleasure, Shankar. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.

Speaker 1 Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

Speaker 1 Our unsung hero this week is Vazkin Mosesian.

Speaker 1 Vazkin is a priest of the Armenian Church. We reached out to him with questions about Armenian choral music.

Speaker 1 He went out of his way to teach us the storied history of the genre and suggested musicians who would be a great fit for today's show. Thank you, Vazgy.

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Speaker 1 I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.