How does azar’s article relate to Human Religious Experience. p.54"Meditation is a family of mental exercises that change the circuits in the brain involved inregulation of emotion and attention," he says.Even religion without a contemplative element may change certain brain circuits, according toresearch by University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht, PhD. His work focuses on a brainwave generated by the anterior cingulate cortex, called "error-related negativity" (ERN), whichspikes when people make mistakes."It's our cortical alarm bell, an 'uh-oh' response that is preconscious and emotional," says Inzlicht."When we make an error, it's arousing, causing slight anxiety."In a study published last year in Psychological Science (Vol. 20, No. 3), he measured this "uh-oh"response in people who performed a standard colornaming Stroop task. Even though all of the 28study participants made mistakes, the ERN firing was less strong in people with more religiouszeal and greater belief in God. "They're calmer and more graceful under pressure," says Inzlicht.In a second set of studies, published in August in Psychological Science (Vol. 21, No. 8), Inzlichtand his colleagues tested whether people who are born with a lower ERN response gravitatetoward religion or whether religion actually lowers this "uh-oh" response. They askedparticipants to write about religion or about something that makes them happy and found thatthose who wrote about religion had a lower ERN response, suggesting that religion dampens thisanxious response. Inzlicht believes religion's effect may come from its ability to make peoplecalmer overall by "explaining" phenomena we don't understand."This difference occurs in only a few hundredths of a second, but we propose that a lifetime ofhaving less intense reactions can lead to a lifetime of being calmer," says Inzlicht.These findings mesh with a large body of research and clinical reports that religious people areless prone to depression and anxiety, says Plante, editor of the book "Contemplative Practices inAction: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health" (APA, 2010). "Adaptive spiritual practices can be afoil to anxiety and depression, Plante says.Having spiritual beliefs might also lead to enjoying a longer, healthier life. A large body ofresearch finds that religious people live longer, are less prone to depression, are less likely toabuse alcohol and drugs, and even go to the dentist more often. Inzlicht's research might providep. 55communities. Graham and Haidt argue that, through stories and rituals, religions have built onfive basic moral foundations: Do no harm, play fairly, be loyal to your group, respect authorityand live purely.Early religions used rituals such as restricting certain foods such as pork and wearingclothing to denote modesty- to publicly demonstrate these moral concerns. Those ritualsthen helped unite people and allowed them to live together cooperatively, says Graham. Today.religions continue that tradition.Of course, while religion brings some people together, it continues to cause deep divisions,says Atran, who has worked as a negotiator in several hotspots around the world, includingIsrael. "The problem is, the more you look inward toward your religious group and its claims ofvirtue, the less you look outward and the more distrustful you are of others," he says.That distrust causes much of the world's strife and violence and is one of the reasons the "newatheists," including British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, PhD, and neuroscientist SamHarris, PhD, want to see religion disappear. But that will be difficult if not impossible if religionis a byproduct of the way our brains work, as much of the recent research suggests, says Atran.What could work, says Norenzayan, is to replace religion with secular communities built on acommon moral foundation. He suggests that Denmark's society is successfully doing this withits large welfare state, its national ethic of hard work and its strong attachment to politicalfreedom and individualism. But such societies will still need many of the components ofreligion, including a belief that we're all part of the samethandanshould make sacrifices that benefit the greater good.a partial explanation for these findings, says University of Miami psychologist MichaelMcCullough, PhD.Pro-socialityReligion may serve another key purpose - it allows people to live in large, cooperative societies,says Norenzayan. In fact, the use of religion as a social tool may largely explain its staying powerand cross-cultural ubiquity."Religion is one of the big ways that human societies have hit on as a solution to induce unrelatedindividuals to be nice to each other," says Norenzayan.In particular, religion encourages people to be more charitable by promoting belief in asupernatural agent, according to his research. In a 2007 study published in Psychological Science(Vol. 18, No. 9), Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed participants with thoughts of God by havingthem unscramble sentences containing words such as "divine," "spirit" and "God." They askedanother group of participants to unscramble religiously neutral words. The participants thendecided how much of $10 to keep and how much to give to a stranger. The researchers foundthat the participants who were primed with religious thoughts gave an average of $2.38 morethan the other participants.University of British Columbia researcher Joseph Henrich, PhD, found crosscultural support forthis finding in a study published in March in Science (Vol. 327, No. 5972). He showed that, across15 diverse societies, people who participated in a world religion were more fair toward strangerswhen playing economic games than people who were not religious."Religion, in a sense, outsources social monitoring to a supernatural agent," says Norenzayan. "Ifyou believe in a monitoring God, even if no one is watching you, you still have to be pro-socialbecause God is watching you."The idea that religion evolved to benefit larger social communities also meshes with theoreticalwork by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, PhD, and his former graduate studentJesse Graham, PhD, now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. In anarticle published in February in Personality and Social Psychology Review (Vol. 14, No. 1), theysuggest that religion co-evolved with morality as a way to bind people into large moral"}} p. 52AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONHome () Monitor on Psychology (/montar) 2000 (onitor/200)December (/monitor/2010)Cover StoryA Reason to BelieveReligion may fill the human need forsupporting social organizationding meaning, sparing us from existential angst while alsoresearchers say.By Beth AzarDecember 2010, Vol 41. No. 11Print version: page 5212 min readHarking back to Sigmund Freud, some psychologists have characterized religious beliefs aspathological, seeing religion as a malignant social force that encourages irrational thoughts andritualisticbehaviors.Of course, psychologists' doubts and those of countless others throughout history - haven'tcurtailed religion's powerful hold on humans. Religion has survived and thrived for more than100,000 years. It exists in every culture, with more than 85 percent of the world's populationembracing some sort of religious belief.Researchers who study the psychology and neuroscience of religion are helping to explain whysuch beliefs are so enduring. They're finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the wayour brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, toanthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.Religion has survived, they surmise, because it helped us form increasingly larger social groupsheld together by common beliefs."If we're on the right track with this byproduct idea-and the findings are really getting strong- it's hard to then build the case that religion is a pathology." says psychologist Justin Barrett,PhD, director of the cognition, religion and theology project in the Centre for Anthropology andMind atOxford Universityp. 53grazing cow-to just slightly counterintuitive - a cursing frog - to extremely counterintuitive- a squealing flowering brick. Although people more easily remembered the intuitive stories anhour after reading them, a week later, they were more likely to remember the slightlycounter intuitive stories.This finding held up in both American college students and Maya villagers from the MexicanYucatan, suggesting that stories with a few minimally counterintuitive elements, such as thosefound in many religious stories, are more easily remembered and, presumably, more readilytransmitted from person to person, says Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of BritishColumbia.That said, most researchers don't believe that the cognitive tendencies that bias us towardreligious belief evolved specifically for thinking about religion. Rather, they likely served otheradaptive purposes. For example, because people are quick to believe that someone or somethingis behind even the most benign experiences, they may perceive the sound of the wind rustlingleaves as a potential predator. In evolutionary terms, says Atran, it was probably better for us tomistakenly assume that the wind was a lion than to ignore the rustling and risk death.But this tendency also set us up to believe in an omnipresent God-like concept.Taken together, it's easy to see how these cognitive tendencies could allow our minds to createreligions built on the idea of supernatural beings that watch over our lives, says Atran, director ofresearch at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.Such research also supports the notion that religious thought is in many ways an unavoidablebyproduct of the way our minds work. Psychologist Thomas Plante, PhD, hopes that view willhelp people see themselves as "more whole.""We've had this long history of believing that the things of the spirit are in one camp and thatscience and technology are in another camp," says Plante, professor and director of theSpirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University and president of APA's Div. 36l/about/division/di26) Psychology of Religion). "If anything, this work reiterates that we arewhole people; the biological, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual are all connected."Predisposed to believeThere's no one cognitive tendency that undergirds all our religious beliefs, says Barrett. "It's reallyyour basic, garden-variety cognitions that provide the impetus for religious beliefs," he says.A common thread to those cognitions is that they lead us to see the world as a place with anintentional design, created by someone or something. Young children, for example, tend tobelieve that even trivial aspects of the natural world were created with purpose, according to aseries of studies by Boston University psychologist Deborah Keleman, PhD. If you ask childrenwhy a group of rocks are pointy, for example, they say something like, "It's so that animals won'tsit on them and break them." If you ask them why rivers exist, they say it's so we can go fishing.Adults also tend to search for meaning, particularly during times of uncertainty, researchsuggests, A 2008 study in Science (Vol. 322, No. 5898) by Jennifer Whitson, PhD, and AdamGalinsky, PhD, found that people were more likely to see patterns in a random display of dots ifthe researchers first primed them to feel that the participants had no control. This findingsuggests that people are primed to see signs and patterns in the world around them, theresearchers conclude.People also have a bias for believing in the supernatural, says Barrett. In his work, he finds thatchildren as young as age 3 naturally attribute supernatural abilities and immortality to "God."even if they've never been taught about God, and they tell elaborate stories about their livesbefore they were born, what Barrett calls "pre-life.""What we're showing is that our basic cognitive equipment biases us toward certain kinds ofthinking and leads to thinking about a pre-life, an afterlife, gods, invisible beings that are doingthings - themes common to most of the world's religions," says Barrett.That basic equipment includes a memory system that appears to be exceptionally good atremembering the kinds of stories found in many religious texts. In particular, research finds thatwe most easily recall stories with some, but not too many, counterintuitive or "supernatural"elements. In one study, published in 2006 in Cognitive Science (Vol. 30, No. 3). Scott Atran, PhD,and Ara Norenzayan, PhD, tested people's recall of concepts that ranged from intuitive - aNeural underpinningsNeuroscience research supports the idea that the brain is primed to believe, says JordanGrafman, PhD, director of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute ofNeurological Disorders and Stroke. This tendency, he says, is spread throughout the brain, andprobably arose from neural circuits developed for other uses"The idea that got a lot of attention several years ago that there's a "God spot" in the brain wherereligious thoughts and feelings arise has largely been rejected," says Grafman, who will bemoving to the Kessler Foundation in West Orange, N.J., in January to lead a traumatic brain injuryresearch laboratory.In 2009, Grafman published an fMRI study showing that religious thoughts activate the area ofthe brain involved in deciphering other people's emotions and intentions the ability known astheory of mind. In the study of 40 people, published in the Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences (Vol. 106, No. 12), Grafman and his colleagues found that when they heard phrasessuch as "God's will guides my acts" and "God protects one's life," areas of the brain involved intheory of mind lit up. In a study published in 2009 in Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience (Vol4, No.2),a Danish team saw the same brain areas activate when religious participants prayed.These results suggest that when people think about God, it's similar to thinking about any specialauthority figure, such as one's mother or father, says Grafman. In addition, he says,contemplation is not limited to religious thought, although certain traditions like prayer ormeditation may require selective kinds of thinking processes. In general, he believes, the brainuses the same circuits to think about and experience religion as it does to think about and handleany other thoughts or beliefs.What may make religion different from mundane thoughts about one's parents are contemplativetraditions, such as meditation and prayer, which have the potential to change how the brain iswired among regular practitioners, says University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson,PhD. His work using both fMRI and EEG to measure brain activity of long-term Buddhistmeditation practitioners during meditation shows that they have a stronger and better organizedattention system than people who are just learning how to meditate. In essence, meditation-and perhaps any contemplative spiritual practice- enhances attention and turns off the areas ofthe brain that focus on the self.

Question

How does azar’s article relate to Human Religious Experience. p.54&#34;Meditation is a family of mental exercises that change the circuits in the brain involved inregulation of emotion and attention,&#34; he says.Even religion without a contemplative element may change certain brain circuits, according toresearch by University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht, PhD. His work focuses on a brainwave generated by the anterior cingulate cortex, called &#34;error-related negativity&#34; (ERN), whichspikes when people make mistakes.&#34;It's our cortical alarm bell, an 'uh-oh' response that is preconscious and emotional,&#34; says Inzlicht.&#34;When we make an error, it's arousing, causing slight anxiety.&#34;In a study published last year in Psychological Science (Vol. 20, No. 3), he measured this &#34;uh-oh&#34;response in people who performed a standard colornaming Stroop task. Even though all of the 28study participants made mistakes, the ERN firing was less strong in people with more religiouszeal and greater belief in God. &#34;They're calmer and more graceful under pressure,&#34; says Inzlicht.In a second set of studies, published in August in Psychological Science (Vol. 21, No. 8), Inzlichtand his colleagues tested whether people who are born with a lower ERN response gravitatetoward religion or whether religion actually lowers this &#34;uh-oh&#34; response. They askedparticipants to write about religion or about something that makes them happy and found thatthose who wrote about religion had a lower ERN response, suggesting that religion dampens thisanxious response. Inzlicht believes religion's effect may come from its ability to make peoplecalmer overall by &#34;explaining&#34; phenomena we don't understand.&#34;This difference occurs in only a few hundredths of a second, but we propose that a lifetime ofhaving less intense reactions can lead to a lifetime of being calmer,&#34; says Inzlicht.These findings mesh with a large body of research and clinical reports that religious people areless prone to depression and anxiety, says Plante, editor of the book &#34;Contemplative Practices inAction: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health&#34; (APA, 2010). &#34;Adaptive spiritual practices can be afoil to anxiety and depression, Plante says.Having spiritual beliefs might also lead to enjoying a longer, healthier life. A large body ofresearch finds that religious people live longer, are less prone to depression, are less likely toabuse alcohol and drugs, and even go to the dentist more often. Inzlicht's research might providep. 55communities. Graham and Haidt argue that, through stories and rituals, religions have built onfive basic moral foundations: Do no harm, play fairly, be loyal to your group, respect authorityand live purely.Early religions used rituals such as restricting certain foods such as pork and wearingclothing to denote modesty- to publicly demonstrate these moral concerns. Those ritualsthen helped unite people and allowed them to live together cooperatively, says Graham. Today.religions continue that tradition.Of course, while religion brings some people together, it continues to cause deep divisions,says Atran, who has worked as a negotiator in several hotspots around the world, includingIsrael. &#34;The problem is, the more you look inward toward your religious group and its claims ofvirtue, the less you look outward and the more distrustful you are of others,&#34; he says.That distrust causes much of the world's strife and violence and is one of the reasons the &#34;newatheists,&#34; including British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, PhD, and neuroscientist SamHarris, PhD, want to see religion disappear. But that will be difficult if not impossible if religionis a byproduct of the way our brains work, as much of the recent research suggests, says Atran.What could work, says Norenzayan, is to replace religion with secular communities built on acommon moral foundation. He suggests that Denmark's society is successfully doing this withits large welfare state, its national ethic of hard work and its strong attachment to politicalfreedom and individualism. But such societies will still need many of the components ofreligion, including a belief that we're all part of the samethandanshould make sacrifices that benefit the greater good.a partial explanation for these findings, says University of Miami psychologist MichaelMcCullough, PhD.Pro-socialityReligion may serve another key purpose - it allows people to live in large, cooperative societies,says Norenzayan. In fact, the use of religion as a social tool may largely explain its staying powerand cross-cultural ubiquity.&#34;Religion is one of the big ways that human societies have hit on as a solution to induce unrelatedindividuals to be nice to each other,&#34; says Norenzayan.In particular, religion encourages people to be more charitable by promoting belief in asupernatural agent, according to his research. In a 2007 study published in Psychological Science(Vol. 18, No. 9), Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed participants with thoughts of God by havingthem unscramble sentences containing words such as &#34;divine,&#34; &#34;spirit&#34; and &#34;God.&#34; They askedanother group of participants to unscramble religiously neutral words. The participants thendecided how much of $10 to keep and how much to give to a stranger. The researchers foundthat the participants who were primed with religious thoughts gave an average of $2.38 morethan the other participants.University of British Columbia researcher Joseph Henrich, PhD, found crosscultural support forthis finding in a study published in March in Science (Vol. 327, No. 5972). He showed that, across15 diverse societies, people who participated in a world religion were more fair toward strangerswhen playing economic games than people who were not religious.&#34;Religion, in a sense, outsources social monitoring to a supernatural agent,&#34; says Norenzayan. &#34;Ifyou believe in a monitoring God, even if no one is watching you, you still have to be pro-socialbecause God is watching you.&#34;The idea that religion evolved to benefit larger social communities also meshes with theoreticalwork by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, PhD, and his former graduate studentJesse Graham, PhD, now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. In anarticle published in February in Personality and Social Psychology Review (Vol. 14, No. 1), theysuggest that religion co-evolved with morality as a way to bind people into large moral&#34;}} p. 52AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONHome () Monitor on Psychology (/montar) 2000 (onitor/200)December (/monitor/2010)Cover StoryA Reason to BelieveReligion may fill the human need forsupporting social organizationding meaning, sparing us from existential angst while alsoresearchers say.By Beth AzarDecember 2010, Vol 41. No. 11Print version: page 5212 min readHarking back to Sigmund Freud, some psychologists have characterized religious beliefs aspathological, seeing religion as a malignant social force that encourages irrational thoughts andritualisticbehaviors.Of course, psychologists' doubts and those of countless others throughout history - haven'tcurtailed religion's powerful hold on humans. Religion has survived and thrived for more than100,000 years. It exists in every culture, with more than 85 percent of the world's populationembracing some sort of religious belief.Researchers who study the psychology and neuroscience of religion are helping to explain whysuch beliefs are so enduring. They're finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the wayour brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, toanthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.Religion has survived, they surmise, because it helped us form increasingly larger social groupsheld together by common beliefs.&#34;If we're on the right track with this byproduct idea-and the findings are really getting strong- it's hard to then build the case that religion is a pathology.&#34; says psychologist Justin Barrett,PhD, director of the cognition, religion and theology project in the Centre for Anthropology andMind atOxford Universityp. 53grazing cow-to just slightly counterintuitive - a cursing frog - to extremely counterintuitive- a squealing flowering brick. Although people more easily remembered the intuitive stories anhour after reading them, a week later, they were more likely to remember the slightlycounter intuitive stories.This finding held up in both American college students and Maya villagers from the MexicanYucatan, suggesting that stories with a few minimally counterintuitive elements, such as thosefound in many religious stories, are more easily remembered and, presumably, more readilytransmitted from person to person, says Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of BritishColumbia.That said, most researchers don't believe that the cognitive tendencies that bias us towardreligious belief evolved specifically for thinking about religion. Rather, they likely served otheradaptive purposes. For example, because people are quick to believe that someone or somethingis behind even the most benign experiences, they may perceive the sound of the wind rustlingleaves as a potential predator. In evolutionary terms, says Atran, it was probably better for us tomistakenly assume that the wind was a lion than to ignore the rustling and risk death.But this tendency also set us up to believe in an omnipresent God-like concept.Taken together, it's easy to see how these cognitive tendencies could allow our minds to createreligions built on the idea of supernatural beings that watch over our lives, says Atran, director ofresearch at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.Such research also supports the notion that religious thought is in many ways an unavoidablebyproduct of the way our minds work. Psychologist Thomas Plante, PhD, hopes that view willhelp people see themselves as &#34;more whole.&#34;&#34;We've had this long history of believing that the things of the spirit are in one camp and thatscience and technology are in another camp,&#34; says Plante, professor and director of theSpirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University and president of APA's Div. 36l/about/division/di26) Psychology of Religion). &#34;If anything, this work reiterates that we arewhole people; the biological, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual are all connected.&#34;Predisposed to believeThere's no one cognitive tendency that undergirds all our religious beliefs, says Barrett. &#34;It's reallyyour basic, garden-variety cognitions that provide the impetus for religious beliefs,&#34; he says.A common thread to those cognitions is that they lead us to see the world as a place with anintentional design, created by someone or something. Young children, for example, tend tobelieve that even trivial aspects of the natural world were created with purpose, according to aseries of studies by Boston University psychologist Deborah Keleman, PhD. If you ask childrenwhy a group of rocks are pointy, for example, they say something like, &#34;It's so that animals won'tsit on them and break them.&#34; If you ask them why rivers exist, they say it's so we can go fishing.Adults also tend to search for meaning, particularly during times of uncertainty, researchsuggests, A 2008 study in Science (Vol. 322, No. 5898) by Jennifer Whitson, PhD, and AdamGalinsky, PhD, found that people were more likely to see patterns in a random display of dots ifthe researchers first primed them to feel that the participants had no control. This findingsuggests that people are primed to see signs and patterns in the world around them, theresearchers conclude.People also have a bias for believing in the supernatural, says Barrett. In his work, he finds thatchildren as young as age 3 naturally attribute supernatural abilities and immortality to &#34;God.&#34;even if they've never been taught about God, and they tell elaborate stories about their livesbefore they were born, what Barrett calls &#34;pre-life.&#34;&#34;What we're showing is that our basic cognitive equipment biases us toward certain kinds ofthinking and leads to thinking about a pre-life, an afterlife, gods, invisible beings that are doingthings - themes common to most of the world's religions,&#34; says Barrett.That basic equipment includes a memory system that appears to be exceptionally good atremembering the kinds of stories found in many religious texts. In particular, research finds thatwe most easily recall stories with some, but not too many, counterintuitive or &#34;supernatural&#34;elements. In one study, published in 2006 in Cognitive Science (Vol. 30, No. 3). Scott Atran, PhD,and Ara Norenzayan, PhD, tested people's recall of concepts that ranged from intuitive - aNeural underpinningsNeuroscience research supports the idea that the brain is primed to believe, says JordanGrafman, PhD, director of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute ofNeurological Disorders and Stroke. This tendency, he says, is spread throughout the brain, andprobably arose from neural circuits developed for other uses&#34;The idea that got a lot of attention several years ago that there's a &#34;God spot&#34; in the brain wherereligious thoughts and feelings arise has largely been rejected,&#34; says Grafman, who will bemoving to the Kessler Foundation in West Orange, N.J., in January to lead a traumatic brain injuryresearch laboratory.In 2009, Grafman published an fMRI study showing that religious thoughts activate the area ofthe brain involved in deciphering other people's emotions and intentions the ability known astheory of mind. In the study of 40 people, published in the Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences (Vol. 106, No. 12), Grafman and his colleagues found that when they heard phrasessuch as &#34;God's will guides my acts&#34; and &#34;God protects one's life,&#34; areas of the brain involved intheory of mind lit up. In a study published in 2009 in Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience (Vol4, No.2),a Danish team saw the same brain areas activate when religious participants prayed.These results suggest that when people think about God, it's similar to thinking about any specialauthority figure, such as one's mother or father, says Grafman. In addition, he says,contemplation is not limited to religious thought, although certain traditions like prayer ormeditation may require selective kinds of thinking processes. In general, he believes, the brainuses the same circuits to think about and experience religion as it does to think about and handleany other thoughts or beliefs.What may make religion different from mundane thoughts about one's parents are contemplativetraditions, such as meditation and prayer, which have the potential to change how the brain iswired among regular practitioners, says University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson,PhD. His work using both fMRI and EEG to measure brain activity of long-term Buddhistmeditation practitioners during meditation shows that they have a stronger and better organizedattention system than people who are just learning how to meditate. In essence, meditation-and perhaps any contemplative spiritual practice- enhances attention and turns off the areas ofthe brain that focus on the self.

Accepted Answer

In the article "A Reason to Believe," Beth Azar explores the complex interrelationships between…