A critique of the neuroscience research on religion and spirituality

This article critically reviews the literature on neuroscience of religion and spirituality. Studies, based on the applied task, were categorized and reviewed and their problems have been addressed. Using insufficient and too small samples, being artificial, being non-experimental, lack of control, not addressing the intervening variables were among the most common methodological problems. This review showed that religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences were not associated with any particular cortical or sub-cortical region. This finding seems to show that such experiences phenomenologically are not of one single experience, and probably there is not such thing as “God zone” in the brain. The frontal lobe was more than any other lobes involved in religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences which may show the relative importance of cognition in such experiences, in comparison with emotion. In addition, the probability experimentally inducing religious experience and the idea that religion is pathological have been questioned.