Rhetoric Race and Religion
Made entirely of gray matter and distinguished by its characteristic folds, the cerebral cortex is the brain’s outermost layer covering the hemispheres. Now, researchers from New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University found the importance of religion or spirituality to individuals may be linked to the thickness of their cerebral cortices. “Importance of religion or spirituality, but not frequency of [house of worship] attendance, was associated with thicker cortices in the left and right parietal and occipital regions, the mesial frontal lobe of the right hemisphere, and the cuneus and precuneus in the left hemisphere,” wrote the authors in their study, published this month in JAMA Psychology. Significantly, this relationship between spiritual importance and cortex thickness was observed to be strongest among those at high risk of depression.
Depression Related to Importance of Divinity
In their previous work, the team of researchers reported that among adults in families at high risk for major depression, those that expressed a strong interest in their spirituality had a 90 percent decreased risk of the illness when compared to those who did not find religion so important. The team of colleagues also showed in a previous study that high-risk adults showed large expanses of cortical thinning across the lateral surface of the right hemisphere of the brain. For their new study, the team returned to this issue of cerebral cortex thickness. They began by questioning 103 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 about the importance of spirituality in their lives and how often they attended religious services. Then, they repeated these questions after five years. Some participants were the children or grandchildren of participants in an earlier study about depression and so were deemed at high risk for the illness; others had no family history of this mental illness and so served as a comparison group. The researchers imaged the brains of all the participants to determine the thickness of the cortices. What did they discover?
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