The Truth is in There: Belief Processes in the Human Brain

Résumé fourni par la source

Belief has been defined by William James as the mental state or function of cognizing reality, and is a core psychological function with a strong influence on emotional states and behavior. Further, strong and aberrant beliefs about the world and oneself play important roles in mental disorders. The underlying processes of belief have been the matter of a long and intensive debate in philosophy and psychology, and modern neuroimaging techniques might provide important insight into the underlying neural processes.Based on seminal neuroimaging work on belief by Harris et al. (2008), we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with N=30 healthy participants in which we presented 100 statements about facts, politics, religion, conspiracy theories, and superstition. For each statement, participants judged whether they considered it as true (belief) or not (disbelief), and reported their certainty in the decision.For the contrast belief > disbelief we found activations in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left superior parietal cortex, and left lateral frontopolar cortex. For the contrast disbelief > belief we found an anterior temporal cluster extending into the amygdala. We replicated a larger deactivation for disbelief than belief in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but in the decision phase and not during statement presentation, suggesting a role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in belief-related decision making. When we analyzed category-specific effects, we found significantly higher activation in the retrosplenial cortex and parahippocampal gyrus for disbelief > belief for conspiracy theory statements.Exploratory analyses of linear associations with certainty and uncertainty identified networks centered at the anterior cingulate cortex for certainty, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for uncertainty. The dorsomedial prefrontal uncertainty effect identifies a neural substrate for Alexander Bain’s notion from 1859 of uncertainty as the real opposite of belief.Taken together, our results suggest a two-factor neural process model of belief with falsehood/veracity and uncertainty/certainty factors.

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