The cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what they have found, I will focus on three key snapshots.
The first one, from 2003, is probably the most photogenic moment of “neuro-atheism”. Biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins travelled to the lab of Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger in the hope of having a religious experience.
In this BBC Horizon film, God on the Brain, a retro science-fiction helmet was placed on Dawkins’s head. This “god helmet” generated weak magnetic fields, applied to the temporal lobes.
Persinger had previously shown that this kind of stimulation triggered a wide range of religious phenomena – from sensing the presence of someone invisible to prompting out-of-body experiences. With Dawkins, though, the experiment failed. As it…