Beliefs profoundly affect people’s lives, but their cognitive and neural…

For those looking for documentation closer to the original research of the brain damage/brain retardation associated with those involved in “fundamentalism” – as opposed to a secondary reference describing the research, I provide the following.

I acknowledge that secondary references lack the same credibility as documentation nearer the primary source. Therefore, for more serious Christian apologetics, providing documentation nearer the primary source is a critical part of the process for both credibility and integrity.

Associating brain process/function with belief structures is simply a new and open area – and one that can be critical for quality Christian apologetics.

Here is the key introductory paragraph –

Beliefs profoundly affect people’s lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing ofreligious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI).

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500821/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500821/)

Beliefs profoundly affect people’s lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which …