Yes snorting LSD, is the same as seeing god.

Religion is like drugs in the way it activates the brain, scientists say

    John Ross
    Higher Education reporter
    Sydney


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/religion-is-like-drugs-in-the-way-it-activates-the-brain-scientists-say/news-story/


Religion is the opiate of the masses, Karl Marx said. New research suggests he may have been right, with scientists finding that religious experiences light up the brain in much the same way as drugs.

MRI scans of 19 devout Mormons have revealed that powerful spiritual feelings activate the “nucleus accumbens”, known as the brain’s reward circuit.

“This puts religious experience in the context of other pleasure inducers in the brain — listening to music, types of love, also gambling (and) experiences from cocaine or meth amphetamines,” said lead researcher Jeff Anderson, a neurobiologist with the University of Utah.

The study was published overnight in the journal Social Neuroscience. The participants, all former missionaries, worked themselves into states of religious fervour by praying, reading inspirational quotes and watching church videos inside the scanner.

The nucleus accumbens was “consistently” activated across four independent experiments, Dr Anderson said. This pointed to a “classical conditioning” mechanism whereby reward circuits of the brain could be used to reinforce religious behaviour and conviction.

He said “maladaptive” and wholesome religious experiences could be shaped by the same stimuli, suggesting that altruism could trigger the same feelings as extremism. “There’s no real reason why any religious ideal — from love your neighbour to follow your leader — couldn’t be trained to elicit similar feelings under an appropriate system of religious reinforcement,” Dr Anderson said.

“If you have a Lutheran woman reading the bible in Minnesota or an ISIS member contemplating religious violence, it’s entirely possible that the same circuits of the brain are involved (and) it feels the same way.”

Dr Anderson stressed that the findings might not apply to advocates of other religions. Research had uncovered different brain responses to the meditative practices characteristic of some eastern religions, but little was known about the neuroscience of western spirituality.

The university said unravelling the brain processes involved in spirituality was important because of the profound influence religious conviction exerted on some people. “Mormons … make decisions based on these feelings (and) treat them as confirmation of doctrinal principles,” it said.

Dr Anderson said scientists were beginning to understand the brain’s participation in experiences believers interpreted as “spiritual, divine or transcendent”.

“In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.”