A neuroscientist asks: Do we long for a divine creator or do we just want our mommies?

The intense feelings that believers in religion describe as the sensation of being in the presence of — or being embraced by — God, but where do those strong intuitions come from?

A neuroscientist-turned-computational biologist lays out a provocative theory in his new book, where he argues that the connection to God that some people feel comes from the same neural circuitry behind an infant's love for their mother. 

Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald spoke with John Wathey, author of The Phantom God: What neuroscience reveals about the compulsion to believe, about the evidence for this theory.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

What aspect of a person's relationship with their God are you trying to sort through in your book?

What I have concentrated on in my book is the unconditionally loving side of God. I argue the selective evolutionary pressure is for the survival of helpless human infants. Human infants are born completely dependent on their mothers, especially in the first few days, because she's their source of food, warmth, protection and all the rest of it. 

What I argue is that the human brain has been shaped so that a newborn infant expects the existence of another being who is nurturing and protecting, and who will respond to cries. And this innate neural circuitry survives in the brain into adulthood, but normally lies dormant.

Yet, especially in situations where a person is in a moment of crisis or helplessness that mimics the helplessness of infancy, this circuitry can be triggered. And when it is, it gives rise to this vague sense of the existence of some amorphous primordial saviour out there somewhere.

What kind of evidence is there to support this idea that the hardwired longing for your mother might be the basis of religious feelings?

Infants are very sensitive to faces. For example, a newborn human sort of knows what a face is and has what we call "holistic face perception." It's an innate ability we all have that gets greatly elaborated through learning, of course, but even in infancy at birth, human infants are attuned to the faces of other people. With proper controls, you can demonstrate that they even imitate facial expressions and facial gestures when they're newly born. They also are sensitive to the fact that human faces must be upright. 

You can see that not only in vision, but also in the auditory system, the auditory cortex, the sense of hearing. So all of these things show pretty strong evidence that human infants do have some innate cognitive sensitivity to another person.

We hear about people feeling a divine presence during these religious moments. What's going on in the brain that can transform an innate model of the mother from childhood into this sensed presence that's external to oneself?

There are several important places in the brain that get triggered when this is happening. One of the most fascinating was discovered by Michael Ferguson who is himself an ex-Mormon. Mormons have this practice that they call, "feeling the spirit." It's an exercise they do regularly where they meditate on Mormon scriptures or some particular prayer. 

But what they're trying to do is to elicit the feeling of the presence of the Holy Spirit. So they practice this, and they feel that by doing these things, by going through specific rituals, certain memories and meditations, that they can elicit this feeling.

Ferguson recruited Mormon subjects in a brain scanning experiment and had them do this. And he gave them a button they could press whenever they felt that they were at the peak of this feeling of sensing God's presence. So when he did this, he found that a very interesting part of the brain was active that had never been seen active in any other kind of brain imaging experiment for any other kind of religious experience.

This place is the nucleus accumbens. It's deep in the forebrain and it's part of the reward circuitry. And this is the part of the brain that's involved in behaviours that are essential for reproductive success. So that includes eating, hunger and thirst, but also sexual behaviour, sexual attraction and maternal behaviour, an infant's longing for mother and, interestingly, drug addiction.

So it's something that's involved in what I call compulsive behaviours, behaviours that are so important that the brain compels us to do them. It's a very powerful drive that also includes a drive for attachment to parental figures. And I think that's why it lights up in these experiments that Ferguson did.

Produced and written by Sonya Buyting