Does Religion Change Our Brains?

From the age of three, the 12th Century nun, mystic, poet and composer Hildegard von Bingen had dazzling visions of shimmering points of light and falling stars, which she recorded in detail in her writings and in paintings. The visions were accompanied by revelations about scripture and humanity’s place in the cosmos that she attributed to the will of God. Neurologist Oliver Sacks famously argued in his 1970 book Migraine that Von Bingen’s visions were “indisputably” migraine auras, echoing an earlier hypothesis by British historian of science Charles Singer, who recognized clinical descriptions of visual disturbance in her art.

It is impossible to know whether their shared hypothesis was correct. But it has become evident in recent decades, through the emergence of a science sometimes referred to as neurotheology, that the agonies and ecstasies of religious experience are often reflected in the workings and architecture of our brains. Recently, an international team of scientists from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East set out to systematically review how different religious practices show up in the brain.

Across the millennia, humans have devised many ways to commune with the divine: meditation, chanting, recitation, musical worship, prayer, mediumistic trance. Some of these practices require more devotional attention than others, and some of them can produce altered states of consciousness. The team synthesized the findings of 105 studies spanning 28 years (1998-2026), across eight different religious traditions, and seven different types of imaging.

Their primary finding was that religious and spiritual practices can produce consistent, and in some cases, lasting changes to how the physical brain looks and works, such as altered gray matter or connectivity between regions. Each practice differed in significant ways from the next, but two regions showed up most frequently in the results. The first was the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s control center, which handles high-level thinking, decision-making, and emotional control.

The second was the anterior cingulate cortex, deep in the middle of the brain, which acts as a bridge between the brain’s thinking areas and emotional areas. They published their results in the journal Brain and Behavior. Devotional OM chanting, for example, seems to calm both the brain’s emotional alarm center, the amygdala, and other emotion centers found deep in the limbic system, the team found.

But Buddhist chanting activated the amygdala instead, and seemed to tune the dial on other emotional centers in the limbic system. Likewise, how prayer shaped the brain seemed to depend very much on the type of prayer practiced. Improvised personal prayer was found to activate regions of the brain central to interpersonal connection.