Religion's neural underpinnings have long been a topic of speculation and debate, but an emerging neuroscience of religion is beginning to clarify which regions of the brain integrate moral, ritual, and supernatural religious beliefs with functionally adaptive responses. In my presentation, I will review evidence indicating that religious cognition involves a complex interplay among the brain regions underpinning cognitive control, social reasoning, social motivations, emotion, reinforcement, and ideological beliefs. I will then conclude my presentation by summarizing current and future research efforts and why searching for God in the brain is critical to our understanding of human behavior.

Upon conclusion of this course, learners will be able to:

1. 1. Summarize the methods used to study the neural basis of religious belief.

Instead of endorsing an all-encompassing view about the influence of abstractions in predictive processing, I suggest that most deliberative thought including complex abstractions, agent actions, and/or perceived environmental sequences are stored in the human prefrontal cortex in the form of structured event complexes.

On the basis of neuroiinaging studies, Posner & Raichle summarily report that the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive functioning and attention. In contrast to that superficial view, we briefly describe a testable model of the kinds of representations that are stored in prefrontal cortex, which, when activated, are expressed via plans, actions, thematic knowledge, and schemas.

There are a number of devices now used in automobiles that allow subscribed companies to track the car and to aid the owner in the case of accidents, lockouts, being lost, etc. Even in the age of the cell-phone, having a human whom you can routinely contact and who is paid to help you when a problem occurs is reassuring. Given the forthcoming graying of the baby boomers with a significant proportion of us developing a dementia, along with the large number of people who suffer head injuries, strokes, and similar disorders, the market for a similar device, worn on the body—perhaps as a secured bracelet—appears obvious. Compensatory aids may have an important role to play in helping patients become functional—particularly when used as a reminder, to orient them to time and place, or to provide a human voice to give instructions when necessary. Since one operator potentially can handle many patients at the same time, it could be a cost-effective device to obtain. I say “may have an important role” because very few studies have used such a device, much less carefully evaluated its usefulness. In this issue, Fish, Manly, and Wilson (2008) describe a very nice application of a single-case design to evaluate the use of a compensatory device in a patient with a frontal lobe lesion associated with deficits in planning that were characterized as goal-neglect by the authors.

High temporal resolution event-related brain potential and electroencephalographic coherence studies of the neural substrate of short-term storage in working memory indicate that the sustained coactivation of both prefrontal cortex and the posterior cortical systems that participate in the initial perception and comprehension of the retained information are involved in its storage. These studies further show that short-term storage mechanisms involve an increase in neural synchrony between prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex and the enhanced activation of long-term memory representations of material held in short-term memory. This activation begins during the encoding/comprehension phase and evidently is prolonged into the retention phase by attentional drive from prefrontal cortex control systems. A parsimonious interpretation of these findings is that the long-term memory systems associated with the posterior cortical processors provide the necessary representational basis for working memory, with the property of short-term memory decay being primarily due to the posterior system. In this view, there is no reason to posit specialized neural systems whose functions are limited to those of short-term storage buffers. Prefrontal cortex provides the attentional pointer system for maintaining activation in the appropriate posterior processing systems. Short-term memory capacity and phenomena such as displacement of information in short-term memory are determined by limitations on the number of pointers that can be sustained by the prefrontal control systems.

The goal of our target article is to establish that electrophysiological data constrain models of short-term memory retention operations to schemes in which activated long-term memory is its representational basis. The temporary stores correspond to neural circuits involved in the perception and subsequent processing of the relevant information, and do not involve specialized neural circuits dedicated to the temporary holding of information outside of those embedded in long-term memory. The commentaries ranged from general agreement with the view that short-term memory stores correspond to activated long-term memory (e.g., Abry, Sato, Schwartz, Loevenbruck & Cathiard [Abry etal.], Cowan, Fuster, Grote, Hickok & Buchsbaum, Keenan, Hyönä & Kaakinen [Keenan et al.], Martin, Morra), to taking a definite exception to this view (e.g., Baddeley, Düzel, Logie & Della Sala, Kroger, Majerus, Van der Linden, Colette & Salmon [Majerus et al.], Vallar).