The Positive and Negative Effects of Religion with Insights from Cognitive Science on How Belief Shapes the Brain, Balances Stress, Builds Community, and Sometimes Fuels Division. What is neurotheology and why does it matter?
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Happy weekend! In this post, I will share my research into the effects of belief and faith on our cognitive system based on my research into neurotheology, observations, and personal experiences.
I decided to write this article as recently, we had a lively conversation in my Superlearners community about belief, faith, religion, and spirituality, and how they shape our cognitive system. Some older members recalled praying before their exams as children, believing it helped them concentrate, remember more, and even achieve better results. They asked me whether cognitive science or neuroscience provides any evidence for these experiences.
My answer was yes. I have been researching this topic for many years, exploring how cognitive science connects with spirituality and how belief influences memory, stress, and learning. I told them that everyone believes in something — whether it is a divine presence, a moral principle, or the reliability of science itself. Faith, in one form or another, is a natural part of being human.
In this article, I will summarize the findings of my studies at a broad level to give you a perspective on the positive and negative effects of religion and spirituality. This is not about defending any specific religion or criticizing any particular tradition. Instead, it is an attempt to look at belief systems, formal or informal, through the lens of neuroscience, psychology, and lived human experience.
Introduction to Belief and Its Impact on the Brain
Religion has shaped human life for millennia. It guides values, rituals, and identities, while also provoking conflict, division, and deep debate.
When I study religion through the lens of cognitive science, I see not only cultural traditions but also neurological and psychological processes.
Belief, ritual, and spirituality touch the Default Mode Network in the brain that governs self-reflection, the Salience Network that detects what feels meaningful, and the reward circuits that deliver pleasure and motivation.
Asking about the positive and negative effects of religion is therefore not only a question of philosophy or theology. It is also a scientific inquiry: how does religion affect the brain, the body, and the way we think?
Insights from My Personal Journey
As a child, I grew up in an environment where religion was part of daily life. I learned prayers before I could properly write, absorbed rituals from my family, and believed strongly that faith was the foundation of truth.
Like many children, I felt comfort in the certainty of religion. It provided answers to mysteries that otherwise seemed overwhelming. The religious or spiritual stories told by my grandparents enriched my mind with creative imagination, which helps me in my writing journey.
During adolescence, however, I began to notice contradictions between what I learned in religious teachings and what I observed in science.
Cognitive dissonance became part of my inner dialogue. I still valued the sense of community and belonging that religion provided, but I began to ask questions about the logic of certain doctrines. Instead of strengthening my faith, these questions gradually led me away from organized religion.
While studying advanced science, math, and technology, my mind became uncertain about the existence of divine beings, yet I was deeply fascinated by the psychological and neurological effects of belief.
As an adult in my 40s, I came to identify myself as agnostic, which some of my mentors taught me about its value. It did not mean not to believe anything, but to question things with logic and intuition rather than blind faith.
In my 50s, I found myself more spiritual, not in the sense of doctrine, but in the sense of awe toward the mysteries of nature, the cosmos, and the human brain. For me, science became a pathway to spirituality, and spirituality became a way to frame the profound insights of science.
This personal transition, from believer to agnostic yet spiritual, deeply informs my research. It allows me to see both the positive benefits of religion and the cognitive costs with empathy.
I do not seek to attack or defend faith. Instead, I want to understand how it shapes memory, emotion, bias, and meaning, and why billions of people continue to turn to it, even in a secular age.
Now, I’d like to summarize some positive and negative effects of religion based on my literature reviews, observations, and personal experiences.
What Are the Positive Effects of Religion?
Religion offers powerful benefits that extend into both psychology and neuroscience.
Stress regulation: Prayer, chanting, and meditation activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing cortisol, calming the body, and sharpening the mind. Religious rituals can function as natural stress regulators, offering measurable health benefits. For many believers, this effect feels like inner peace, but neuroscience shows it is a biological shift in hormone balance.
Reward and joy: Neuroscientists studying devout Mormons found that spiritual feelings light up the brain’s nucleus accumbens, the same reward hub activated by love or music. Belief can literally feel like a “high,” reinforcing positive motivation and resilience. These spiritual highs explain why many people return to rituals with devotion.
Memory and attention: Repetition of prayers and rituals can strengthen encoding and recall. Collective recitation engages multiple memory systems, embedding sacred texts into long-term cultural memory. From a cognitive science perspective, this repetition creates neuroplasticity that reinforces belief.
Social bonding: Group worship releases oxytocin and dopamine, enhancing empathy and trust. This creates resilience in the face of adversity and strengthens communities. In my childhood, I remember feeling this bond during religious festivals, where food, music, and collective rituals reinforced belonging.
Meaning-making: Religion provides frameworks that reduce existential anxiety. Rituals and narratives create cognitive coherence, an organized way of making sense of suffering, loss, and life’s uncertainty.
Together, these findings indicate that the benefits of religion are not abstract. They are rooted in biological and cognitive mechanisms that help humans cope, connect, and find meaning.
What Are the Negative Effects of Religion?
Yet the same mechanisms that heal can also harm.
Cognitive bias: Religion can reinforce confirmation bias, where individuals interpret evidence only in ways that support their prior beliefs. This can reduce cognitive flexibility and limit curiosity. As a young adult questioning doctrine, I felt the tension of this bias, the pull to silence questions to preserve belonging.
In-group vs out-group: Religious identity can intensify tribal thinking. The amygdala and salience network may be primed to respond defensively when sacred beliefs feel threatened, leading to prejudice or conflict. This helps explain why religion, while creating unity within, sometimes fuels division between groups. Some stringent religious groups or nations have caused wars in human history, while religions focus on peace.
Obedience and conformity: Experiments in social psychology show how authority reduces critical thinking. In religious settings, strong authority figures can override personal judgment, sometimes with damaging consequences. This was one of the factors that led me to distance myself, the sense that obedience mattered more than independent thought.
Suppression of doubt: Doubt is a natural part of human cognition. In rigid systems, however, questioning can trigger guilt or fear. This may reduce openness, exploration, and adaptive learning. I experienced this personally when I began questioning doctrines as a teenager and felt guilt that was difficult to shake.
Moral outrage and rigidity: When belief becomes identity, threats to faith can trigger extreme responses. The same neural systems that sustain devotion can, under stress, fuel fanaticism.
These disadvantages of religion reveal the double edge of belief: the very tools that strengthen unity can also deepen division.
Here’s How Religion Can Shape the Brain and the Mind.
The brain is not neutral to religion. It changes in response to it and creates new neural networks, which could be positive, negative, or a combination, as I highlighted, depending on the meaning the person assigns and the environmental influences.
Neuroplasticity: Regular ritual practices reshape neural circuits. Meditation and chanting can thicken prefrontal regions involved in attention and emotional regulation.
Reward reinforcement: Just as pleasurable experiences condition behavior, “religious highs” can reinforce ritual participation and adherence.
Collective memory: Religion encodes cultural knowledge, shaping identity across generations. Shared myths and doctrines become part of the mental scaffolding of whole societies.
Placebo and nocebo effects: Faith itself can heal or harm. The belief that prayer or ritual will bring relief can activate placebo responses in the brain, altering perception of pain or health outcomes. Conversely, fear of punishment or sin may act as a nocebo, intensifying stress.
Mystical states: Neuroscience links self-transcendence (states of awe, unity, or oneness) to dynamic interactions between the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Frontoparietal Network. These brain shifts underpin experiences that adherents describe as sacred or divine.
What is neurotheology and why does it matter?
One of the areas I have been closely involved in is what scholars now call neurotheology. This field explores the relationship between the human brain and religion, drawing insights from neuroscience, psychology, theology, and even medicine.
At its core, neurotheology asks: what happens in the brain when people pray, meditate, or enter mystical states, and how do these experiences shape belief and behavior?
In its early development, neurotheology was defined as the intersection between brain science and religion. Today, it is becoming a more rigorous discipline that invites collaboration between experts in neuroscience, theology, and clinical research.
My contribution has been to highlight how cognitive science can connect spirituality with measurable brain activity, offering a framework where faith and science are not in opposition but in conversation.
When I study the brain during religious and spiritual practices, I see fascinating patterns. These practices can shift activity in brain regions that shape emotion, self-awareness, and memory. For example, areas like the precuneus, anterior insula, and ventral striatum become more active, supporting feelings of connection and emotional depth.
When people engage in deep religious contemplation, some even report a sense of transcendence (feeling lifted beyond themselves). Neuroscience shows that during such states, activity in the frontal lobes (responsible for control and planning) decreases, while activity in the parietal lobes (linked to spatial awareness and perspective) increases. This may help explain why people describe these moments as boundary-dissolving or expansive.
The brain also specially treats sacred values and beliefs. When people reflect on what they hold as sacred, areas like the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex can light up.
These regions are involved in processing moral reasoning and emotional regulation. Their activation can buffer against anxiety and guide decisions in powerful ways, sometimes even more strongly than material rewards.
As Dr Michael Broadly articulated clearly and wisely, we need to respect faith without surrendering to dogma. You may also check out Dr Broadly’s perspectives on the value of reading holy scriptures as a scientist or scholar.
Religion works through paradox.
The same neural pathways that deliver calm and joy can also entrench dogma or guilt.
Mystical and experiential spirituality can expand awareness and compassion, yet doctrine-heavy systems can suppress questioning and induce fear.
This paradox explains why religion has been both a force for healing and a spark for conflict throughout history.
Asking “Is religion good or bad?” oversimplifies. The truth is that religion amplifies what is already present in human cognition: the hunger for meaning, the bias for belonging, and the vulnerability to influence.
Conclusions and Key Takeaways
Cognitive science does not seek to praise or condemn religion. Instead, it helps us understand how belief and faith work.
Religion lowers stress, strengthens memory, and builds community. It also causes bias, obedience, and division. It can expand awareness through mystical awe or narrow minds through rigid conformity.
In my view, the most powerful insight is that religion taps into universal cognitive systems, the brain’s circuits for memory, stress, reward, and social connection.
By studying these systems, we begin to see religion less as a mystery and more as a mirror, reflecting both the best and the most fragile aspects of human nature.
I’d like to offer some key takeaways from my research:
- Spiritual highs light up the same brain reward circuits as love and music.
- Ritual repetition sculpts neural pathways, literally reshaping the brain.
- Faith can act as a placebo, producing real physiological changes.
- The same brain systems that create compassion can also produce fanaticism.
- A personal journey from belief to agnosticism can reveal how religion shapes identity, memory, and emotional regulation in ways that linger even after faith fades.
I believe the reflections in this story give you more than information by sparking curiosity about your own patterns of belief.
We all believe in something. For some, it is prayer; for others, it is science, love, or the quiet faith that tomorrow will be better than today. Belief, in one form or another, is the glue that holds our minds together.
There is no single right or wrong way to believe. What matters is context, intention, and impact. When belief unites, comforts, or inspires, it becomes one of the brain’s greatest tools for resilience. When it divides, harms, or silences, it exposes the fragile side of human cognition.
The fundamental insight from cognitive science is not that religion is good or bad, but that belief is a natural function of the brain, one that can heal or hurt depending on how we use it. You may get some inspiring ideas from this previous story.
Whether we pray, meditate, chant, analyze data, or simply trust in love, we are all spiritual beings in material form, looking for meaning to make sense of ourselves, each other, and the universe.
I’d like to obtain your perspectives and personal experiences with religions and spirituality, including faith and belief, and what they mean in your life.
As a cognitive scientist and mental health advocate, I wrote many stories explaining the fundamental requirements of the brain and nervous system with nuances in previous stories, so I link them as a reference here:
Here’s How to Make the Nervous System More Flexible and Functional
Here’s How I Train My Brain Daily for Mental Clarity and Intellectual Productivity.
You can find many relevant stories about brain health and cognitive performance on this list.
Brain Health and Cognitive Function
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