Your Brain on Religion

Can the same basic brain circuitry produce Mother Teresa and Osama bin Laden?

At the University of Utah, neuroscientists Julie Kornberg and Jeff Anderson are studying the activity of the human brain during deep religious experience.

"It amazes me how one of the most profound influences on human behavior is virtually completely unstudied," Anderson said. "We think about how much this drives people's behavior, and yet we don't know the first thing about where in the brain that's even registered."

They're currently studying the neurological activity of Mormons during prayer.

"There are plenty who would relish any data that support the idea that God is all in the mind. But Korenberg and Anderson aren't looking for how people come to believe in a supernatural being. They want to know what happens once they do believe.

"I think we're trying to do something much more simple, and that is look at private religious practice," said Korenberg, who is Jewish, was raised in a Catholic neighborhood in Natick, Mass., and sings in a Christian chorale. "I think that what we're expecting to find here is that Mormons aren't really going to be that different from Jews or Muslims."

Spiritual experience, mystical experience, sacred experience, peak experience—all are names for that inner experience of infinity encountered during deep meditation or contemplative prayer. But does that subjective experience by itself necessarily lead to positive action? A basic idea explored in THE ASSASSIN LOTUS is the way in which a zealot's warped religious understanding distorts or misinterprets that profound inner experience, leading to very unholy behavior.