Monday, November 30 | 4:10 p.m.- 4:20 p.m. | M7-SSNR03-8 | Room E351
Are there brain connection differences between religious and non-religious people? Perhaps, according to a talk to be delivered on Monday afternoon.
Presenter Suvarna Badhe, MBBS, of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago will share results from a study she conducted with colleagues that used functional MRI (fMRI) to explore any divergencies in the activity of resting state brain networks between religious and non-religious people.
The research included 55 subjects, of which 29 identified as religious and 26 as non-religious. The team evaluated and compared seven resting state networks and analyzed the data using the CONN functional connectivity toolbox and Statistical Parametric mapping. In addition to this analysis, Badhe and colleagues obtained "extensive behavioral and belief data and analyzed their relationship to resting state data."
What did the group find? Resting state fMRI scores for religious and non-religious subjects were similar across all of the seven major networks the team tracked. But it did report that when it compared "the relationship between the religious scales and the resting state data," it found that the left and right insular regions (components of the [brain's] salience network important for emotional and self-awareness processes) were positively correlated to the God Image scale only in religious subjects." (This scale was developed to assess and quantify an individual's subjective image of God.)
"There was no such correlation in non-religious subjects," Badhe and colleagues noted.
How might these findings help clinicians interact with their patients? They could "help us better understand the relationship between activity in resting-state networks and behavioral traits," the researchers concluded.
