'Right temporal lobe atrophy' is a rare condition in which a major part of the right side of the brain simply withers away. You can see a particularly severe case in the picture (the right side of the brain is on the left...). Chan and colleagues compared twenty of these patients with twenty patients whose left-hand side of the brain was withered.
As you might expect, all these people had some serious psychological problems. But, for people with left-brain atrophy, the problems are obvious. That's because this side of the brain controls speech and (for most people) the dominant hand. You can pretty readily spot somebody with left-brain atrophy.
Right brain atrophy is altogether more subtle, and also weirder. These patients get lost easily. They find it difficult to recognise faces, and they have a variety of behavioural disorders, including disinhibition and obsessions. One patient insisted on having all the light switches in her house painted gold and silver!
And, interestingly, three patients were 'hyper-religious'.
Now, they don't describe what they mean by this term, and three patients (15%) might not sound like a lot. But none of the patients with left-brain atrophy were hyper-religious. Two patients also had 'complex visual hallucinations of inanimate objects' and two had sensory crossover, in which stimulation of one sense was experienced as a different sense.
Damage to the right brain - albeit the parietal lobes rather than the temporal lobes - has been linked to religiosity previously. Brick Johnstone and Bret Glass found that people with damage in this region were more spiritual, and Cosimo Urgesi and colleagues have found that tumours in this part of the brain also increases religiosity.
That's perhaps because the right hand side of the brain tends to play an important role in spatial awareness.
However, for the sake of the statistical purists who sometimes drop by I should point out that correlation is not causation. Although it seems likely that brain atrophy leads to religion, you can't rule out the possibility of the reverse!
Chan, D., Anderson, V., Pijnenburg, Y., Whitwell, J., Barnes, J., Scahill, R., Stevens, J., Barkhof, F., Scheltens, P., Rossor, M., & Fox, N. (2009). The clinical profile of right temporal lobe atrophy Brain, 132 (5), 1287-1298 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awp037
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
Oh, very droll. :-)
ReplyDeleteThat's fascinating. I'd heard of right parietal lobe associations with religion but never the temporal lobe.
ReplyDeleteYour conclusion about correlation and causation was quite excellent. LOL! :D
You seem... religiously enthusiastic aboutthis intriguing finding. Time to check your temporal lobes perhaps?
ReplyDeleteAlthough it sounds pretty interesting, I would prefer if the study was done on a larger scale. Although it is interesting that in the context of *this* study that there were three "hyper-religious" patients, the fact remains that the sample size overall is very small. It could still be an anomaly.
ReplyDeleteHee hee...
ReplyDeleteNeurologically speaking though, it's hard to interpret findings like these because when half the brain goes wrong you don't know if the symptoms are caused by the damage itself, or abnormal activity related to the damage process, or whatever. It's a lot easier to make sense of specific lesions...
True, but the fact that right-brain lesions seem more often linked to hyper-religiosity than left brain is intriguing. In that vein, here's a fascinating short clip of Ramachandran talking about a split brain patient.
ReplyDeleteAh, but Who ;) gave us our right parietal lobes now?
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered why, despite a religious upbringing, I have never felt any religious symptoms and live happily without them. But then my parents practiced and believed, but were not pious.
ReplyDeleteAs a result of having no religious feelings I have always associated "true religion" with kindness and not doing harm to others and, when possible and wanted, helping out. I also adssociate it with the pursuit of justice. I do have feelings of kindness and good will for others, even strangers I meet. But no Godiness involved. I think I got this disposition from my parents. They were not pious but they were kind, but diplomatic, not imposing their kindness on those who did not want it. They also had a strong sense of justice.
This article makes me think about why we are the way we are.
Thanks to folks like Dr. Daniel Amen ("Change Your Brain, Change Your Life"), who have done alot of research with PET brain scans, I've also become a recent "convert"(!) to the more "mechanistic" view of specific brain areas (temporal lobes, cingulate gyrus, etc.), and their relationship to various (mis)behaviors (ADHD, OCD, Schizophrenia, Violence, etc.).
ReplyDeleteWithin that context, I see a substantial connection between the noted increase in Narcissism throughout western culture (i.e. "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations", Christopher Lasch), and it's accompanying clinical symptom, the total absence of empathy (which is normally located in the pre-frontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of the brain).
Freud, Jung and others have also noted a correlation between Narcissism and so-called "excessive religiosity". And does it get any more narcissistic than the Fundies who brag of a "personal relationship" with God?