Religious believers may seem to share little with nonbelievers when it comes to thinking and judgment. But a new study by UCLA researchers finds that both Christians and nonbelievers use the same parts of the brain when asked to label articles of religious faith as true or false. A report summarizing the study is published today in PLoS ONE. For both groups, the act of judging religious assertions increased activity in several regions of the brain  collectively thought to play key roles in emotional judgment, processing uncertainty, assessing rewards and thinking about oneself.  The 15 Christian believers and 15 nonbelievers whose brains were scanned while assessing the truth of religious tenets were alike in one other respect: Both groups took longer to respond when they were asked to declare their own belief or disbelief in matters of faith than when they were asked to label neutral matters of fact tr…[...]

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Religion: The heart believes what it will, but the brain behaves the same either way