A team of scientists from UCLA and the University of York wanted to know why people hold religious views. Dr Keise Izuma, from the University Of York’s Department of Psychology, explained the theory behind the experiment:

“People often turn to ideology when they are confronted by problems.

We wanted to find out whether a brain region that is linked with solving concrete problems, like deciding how to move one’s body to overcome an obstacle, is also involved in solving abstract problems addressed by ideology.”

That region of the brain, the posterior medial frontal cortex (or pMFC) was “turned down” by Izuma and his colleagues using a transcranial magnetic stimulus.

Test subjects were then subjected to the type of threat that would normally cause a religious or ideological response: specifically, they were either reminded of death or their greatest ideological concern, in this case, illegal immigrants.

With the pMFC sidelined, scientists determined that subjects were 32.8% less likely to say that they believed in God, heaven, or angels. Ideologically, their feelings were 28.5% more positive toward immigrants.

Izuma went on to summarize the findings:

“These findings are very striking. [They are] consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are re-purposed to also produce ideological reactions.”

Ideologies are often a reflection of people’s fears: therefore, it is unknown what studies would produce when targeting the pMFC region of the brain and evaluating subjects’ opinions on other political issues.

The practical applications of this study, if there are any, remain to be seen. But the potential abuse of this technology should be known to the public and fully explored on scientific and ethical levels.