@Jiten Roy,
We are born not only without religiosity but also all sorts of cognitive and other functions. All these functions we acquire through different levels of interactions in a life course. The main objective of this article was not on this mundane issue rather relating the evolutionary relationship between the brain with religion in a scientific perspective. It would be interesting to see the functional relationship in the brain those do not have religiosity of any sort. I have difficulty to find right model as this sort of people as atheists, communists or Chinese have also inclination to some sort of religiosity they believe in. Lot of research is going on religiosity centres in the brain, you will find details in the article below…
regards
Asim Duttaroy

Evolutionary relationship of Religion and Brain
Professor Asim K. Duttaroy,
Faculty of Medicine
University of Oslo
Email: a.k.duttaroy@medisin.uio.no

Introduction
Tagore (Indian Nobel laureate) and Einstein both shared a love for music and nature. Their discussion once turned to truth and beauty and to the question whether these were independent of the human consciousness. When Tagore denied that truth or beauty was independent of the human consciousness, Einstein asked Tagore "If there would be no human beings anymore, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful?" When Tagore replied "No", Einstein answered "I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty but not with respect to Truth." Einstein's point was that scientific truth must be conceived as a truth independent of reality. When Tagore claimed," If there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings." For more on Tagore’s view on the role of consciousness on beauty and truth, please read Tagore’s poem “ Ami”.
“”With the colour of my own consciousness
The emerald became green, the ruby became red.
I opened my eyes at the sky,
And there was light
In the east, in the west.
I looked at the rose and said,`Beautiful!'
Beautiful it became.

You may say, `This is philosophy
Not the message of a poet.'
I will answer, `This is truth,
Hence this is poetry.'
This is my pride--
Pride on behalf of whole mankind.
It is on the canvas of human consciousness
That the Great Creator creates His world of art
The philosopher meditates and chants with every breath--
`No, no, no!
Not emeralds, not rubies, not light, not roses, not you, not I'.
On the other hand, the Infinite Being Himself has pursued His creation
Within the limits of human mind,
And that is called `I'. …..”
----------------(Translation of few parts of Tagore’s poem “Ami”)
Einstein seems to have replied triumphantly, "Then I am more religious than you are." One can imagine from the above conversation on the relationship of mind and perception of beauty, truth, and concept of human religion.

In fact religion is one of five major behavioral phenomena that evolved with modern humans and are found in all human cultures—the others being language, advanced tool-making, music, and art. Indeed, humans have been termed homo religio because of the near-universal belief in God. There is reason to believe that religious experience and behavior have a biological basis, in that religiosity appears to be influenced by inheritance to about the same degree as intelligence. People are looking for something. They're not being fulfilled. It's not in the jobs; it's not in the relationships; it's not in the money. The answer is God. People are finding out there's not too much you can do without Him. For some, religion is a manifestation of God, for others, however, these two are not so inextricably linked. One should not confuse religion and God, in fact, religion is a product of the brain.
Is Religion the product of human brain?
Scientists are looking at religion and the brain in a new field known as neurotheology, or the neuropsychology of religion. These researchers seek to understand not God, but the religious experience. Religion is a behavior that can be studied like any other behavior as religion is considered a physiological phenomenon. In fact, it has been hypothesized that religious experience and behavior have a biological basis and that the brain's evolutionary increase in the neurochemical dopamine (DA) is linked to the evolution of religion. As a result of advances in brain imaging technology, researchers are learning more about how different areas of the brain function based on their respective neural activity. In 1997, scientists discovered a particular area of the brain associated with intense religious experience, named by the popular media as the "God Spot". Neuroscientists claim that this discovery neither reduces religion to a brain function, nor does it prove that our brains are designed to receive the divine. However, it has inspired an emerging field of cognitive neuroscience that seeks to break new ground in the dialogue between science and religion. In light of this research, we need to reconcile these different aspects of our brain in our understanding of the world. Are humans genetically hard-wired for critical thinking and religious spirituality, and what are the implications for the compatibility of science and faith in human experience.
The origin of religion has been postulated to coincide with the beginnings of advanced tool making and art, in what has been termed the human evolutionary “Big Bang”. The gap that exists between the development of anatomically modern humans—now placed at 200,000 years ago and the “Big Bang” (whether that be 40,000 or 80,000 years ago) raises the possibility that other factors besides brain size and shape may have played a role in the evolution of all human culture, including religion. A recent evolutionary theory proposed that the driving force behind the attainment of the modern human intellect was an expansion of dopaminergic brain systems. This expansion began early in primate evolution and produced a more homogenous distribution of DA throughout the brain, particularly in its upper layers where relatively more intracortical circuitry is housed. One reflection of the continued expansion of DA systems in humans is the large increase (near-doubling, relative to body weight) of the DA-rich neostriatum of humans relative to chimpanzees, who spend the majority of their day in peripersonal activities. The initial rise of DA during hominid evolution coincided with and helped lead to an increased tolerance to heat. A precursor to the final stages of human brain evolution about 100,000 years ago appears to have been an increase in the consumption of shellfish and other marine fauna which are rich in n-3 essential fatty acids and iodine that stimulate DA activity, overall brain development, and human intellectual achievement.
In most formalized religions, God is, to varying degrees, external along this spectrum depending upon the dogma. So, paradoxically, while humans want a sense of control, they also seek someone or something outside of themselves to be in control. This external outlook could be due to the neurochemical ratio in the brain. People who have more DA in general tend to be more religious. But there is an interesting caveat. The brain is malleable, and brain chemistry changes in response to environmental pressures. In an uncertain environment you increase your DA and respond to the challenging circumstances. This could explain why people under stressful circumstances-inmates in prison or concentration camps, for example, or soldiers in the front lines of battle-often turn to religion in a conversion.
What someone calls an individual phenomenon but other researchers describe as a social construct, a system designed by a specific society. Humans are primarily social animals with social brains, far more interested in group dynamics and gossip than scientific abstractions. While acknowledging the important role of the brain in understanding the human experience of God, even more than the sheer difficulty of science, what accounts for the persistence of religion is that it, and only it, can provide what most human beings seem to want so desperately: explanations for why bad things happen to good people and the promise of some kind of ultimate reward and compensation from the inevitable pain and suffering of human life. Society determines not just if you are religious, but how that manifests. Native Americans, for example, and other people who lived in closer harmony with nature than most modern Americans, worshipped gods of natural things-so, there is a god of thunder, of the moon, of the cornfields. Like Native Americans, Greeks, Hindus, early Christians and others worshipped female gods. In the U.S., these forms of religion are no longer as popular as they once were. But then again, neither are the traditional churches whose quest for religious freedom helped form this country.
In contrast to the DA expansion, other key neurotransmitter systems such as glutamate and acetylcholine (Ach) have remained the same or even decreased in relative terms during human evolution. The initial rise of DA during hominid evolution coincided with and helped lead to an increased tolerance to heat. The final expansion of DA could have prompted the rise in abstract reasoning, human creativity in the form of art and music, and religious behavior. Both abstract reasoning and religious thought involve an emphasis on non-visible (distant) space and time, and both are linked to the upper field. The final DA expansion may have also led to the onset of clinical disorders in which DA is overactive, such as schizophrenia.among others, has argued that the same processes that led to schizophrenia must have led to advances in human reasoning and religion, because of the higher incidence of creativity and religiosity in first-degree relative of schizophrenics. It might seem strange that “genius and madness” should be so closely linked, especially since the intellectual quotient of schizophrenics is generally below normal. However, one needs to consider the higher (sometimes extremely high) premorbid intellectual capability of many schizophrenics the better relationship between the “positive,” DA -linked symptoms of schizophrenia and intelligence, the high prevalence of “giftedness” found in families of schizophrenics and the positive relationship between mania and intellectual achievement. It might also seem strange that two ostensibly antagonistic processes—religious behavior and abstract (scientific) reasoning—may have co-evolved. However, both phenomena are concerned with abstract concepts and comprehensive frameworks with which to comprehend spatio-temporal events in the external environment. One of these processes (abstract reasoning) is clearly left hemispheric, while the other (religion) has been postulated to be. A common element in these two mental phenomena is suggested by an experiment involving split-brain patients. When randomly presented with keys to the left and right that are rewarded differentially (e.g., 70% to right; 30% to the left), the isolated right hemisphere will maximize rewards by mostly pressing the higher-percentage key. By contrast, the isolated left hemisphere continues to “search” for patterns in the randomness and ends up performing worse than the right one. Searching for the scientific “truth” is a hallmark of the dopamine -rich left hemisphere, but in a random environment such searching begins to resemble the superstitious behavior seen in animals.
The same dopaminergic mechanisms that stimulate exploratory locomotion and vertical climbing in rodents and oculomotor exploratory behavior in lower primates facilitate the search for abstract patterns and meaning in humans in a space that is internally generated but distally oriented (“off-line”). The off-line capability of human thought has provided us with enormous powers of abstract reasoning, generativity and creativity, but the failure to anchor these thought processes with feedback from the external world can lead to bizarre consequences. When sensory or motor feedback from the posterior cortex is diminished or eliminated—due to stress (which depletes serotonin and potentiates a wide range of psychological disorders in which DA activity is excessive), drugs, sensory deprivation, or sleep—the activity of medial DA systems is unleashed from its external anchor, which can lead to incorrect attributions of self-initiated or internally generated activity (e.g.,
hallucinations) and/or empirically unsubstantiated associations of external events (e.g., superstitions). It is notable in this regard that religious explanations are most widely accepted when empirical (scientific) feedback is not readily available or is considered unsatisfactory—e.g., in the origins of the cosmos and the origins of life, in cases of miraculous healing, or in reference to eerie coincidences. When reduced serotonin activity is accompanied by a reduction in the inhibition and updating provided by the “executive” (purposeful) intellect housed in the prefrontal cortex, activity of the mesolimbic dopaminergic system becomes even more random. In a mild form, the enhanced medial DA output may serve to loosen associations, inspire paranormal (schizotypal) beliefs in the “relatedness” of random events while at the same time reducing the propensity to test those beliefs and may even be associated with expanded creativity. In an extreme form, this activity results in bizarre attributions of causality and relatedness and other manifestations (including religious and other delusions) characteristic of actual schizophrenic thought . In Kroll and Sheehan’s study, 70% of schizophrenics claimed to have had a religious experience, with those schizophrenics with additional EEG abnormalities reporting the highest percentage of religious delusions. The greater religiosity–schizotypy link in males as opposed to females could be caused by a greater DA activation in males, given that other disorders associated with DA overactivation show a male predominance. On the other hand, women tend to have more paranormal experiences overall”.
DA gets us thinking about distance-space-time. By this, we mean not just external space, but distant space; not linear time, but eternal time, including the time after death. "Religion is comprised of beliefs, practices and experiences.They generally involve things that are supernatural. DA provides an emphasis on the astral and cosmological events and predictions that are associated with religion. But it is involved not just in thinking about these, but in somehow controlling them. The belief in the ability to connect events and control them-this is something the dopaminergic mind provides. As one of the mediators of the human brain's reward system, DA is responsible for goal-directed behavior and the prediction of outcomes, even to predicting the future, an illusion of control. Humans want to be able to control events. By controlling events, we control anxiety, adding that belief in an afterlife is one type of dopaminergic tendency, leading to a sense that we can control something even if it's beyond our death. Thus, DA regulates the brain's perception of control along a spectrum ranging from an internal locus that assumes a person can control events to an external locus that assumes a person has no control. In other words, from free-will to pre-destiny.
Dreaming, Hallucinations and Religiosity: Role of neurotransmitters
Dreaming has long been part of various religious traditions and is considered a means of receiving messages from the supernatural. Examples of the religious elements of dreams include the meeting of ancestors in dreams the significance of dreams in the Old Testament (e.g., Joseph’s in the Book of Genesis), and the construction of Japanese religious temples in the past to serve as places of dreaming. Of course, the Aboriginal religious concept of the “Dreamtime,” though not alluding to normal dreaming, nevertheless represents a cosmological spirit world into which persons can transcend during religious rituals. Hallucinations during epilepsy and paranoid schizophrenia are believed to have led to experiences that have inspired many of the world’s leading religions. Hallucinations produced by psychoactive agents are also intimately tied to many religious traditions and ceremonies, especially Native American ones. Ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs leads to mystical experiences and religious imagery and experimentation with drugs is often a precursor to joining religious cults in college. One type of hallucination—namely, out-of-body experiences—is commonly experienced during near-death episodes and has assumed importance in many religions. Simple hallucinations are not located in one area of the brain, as stimulation of visual areas gives rise to visual hallucinations, stimulation of auditory areas gives rise to auditory hallucinations, etc.. However, the generation of complex, dream-like associations that include full scenery is most likely to occur following stimulation of the temporal lobe either by seizures or by application of electrical current. The two most sensitive areas appear to be the medial-temporal lobe and the superior portion of the lateral temporal region. Functional imaging studies with subjects who have ingested hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin and ketamine demonstrate that activations of the anterior cingulate, medial-frontal cortex, and even some lateral prefrontal regions occur during hallucinations, alongside de-activation of the primary visual cortex. Out-of-body hallucinations are likely to be associated with prefrontal activation or with damage to posterior vestibular processing areas in the parietal–temporal region, which is an important area for body perception and body cognition. Brain imaging studies with hallucinating schizophrenics indicate that activation of the temporal-lobe, anterior cingulate, and striatum occurs along with de-activation of postcentral (parietal) activity during auditory and visual hallucinations, although some hallucinogens do activate parietal areas. Neuroleptic treatment that helps reduce schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions (two of the most well-known “positive symptoms”) tends to decrease the frontal–parietal activation ratio. Visual hallucinations occurring in patients suffering from a form of sensory deprivation known as the Charles Bonnet syndrome emanate from ventral visual association areas such as the fusiform gyrus, as the primary visual cortex seems particularly resistant to external visual stimulation in this syndrome. Large-scale studies have shown that lesions (i.e., under-activation) of the right hemisphere are almost twice as likely as left-sided ones to produce complex visual hallucinations. Similarly, epileptiform activity (i.e., overactivation) in the left hemisphere is almost twice as likely to produce hallucinations and delusions. Some of the more prominent delusions created by either left-hemispheric overstimulation or right-hemispheric damage include denial or neglect of paralyzed limbs caused by brain damage to the contralateral hemisphere, delusions of alien control, and other depersonalizations, particularly when the right-hemispheric damage involves the body-centered systems housed in the parietal lobe. Out-of-body hallucinations are particularly likely to involve an activation of the left hemisphere and to appear predominantly in the right visual field. Conversely, hallucinations and delusions are more likely to be reduced when the epileptic focus is surgically excised from the left hemisphere than the right one.
In terms of the pharmacology of hallucinations, most researchers have focused on the involvement of DA, ACh, and serotonin (5-HT) , as well as glutamate. Unquestionably, DA is the major (if not critical) neurotransmitter responsible for hallucinations. Drugs that stimulate DA, such as amphetamine and L-dopa, are hallucinogenic whereas drugs that reduce DA transmission (such as haloperidol) tend to diminish or eliminate hallucinations. Moreover, excessive DA is believed to lead to the positive symptoms (including hallucinations and delusions) found in schizophrenia and related disorders. Dopaminergic activation has also been implicated in the effects of sensory deprivation, which frequently includes hallucinations. This makes sense in that DA is poorly represented in primary sensory areas of the cortex. and should, therefore, be relatively more active during sensory isolation and deprivation than the other three major transmitters, which are more tied to de-activated sensory processing areas.
DA is also implicated in the near-death experiences that, despite variations in content across cultures, appear to be a universal phenomenon among humans. The near-death experience typically involves a transport into a “different world,” encounters with “different beings,” or some even more direct form of an out-of-body experience (e.g., autoscopy, the experience of looking at oneself from above). These experiences are more likely to be interpreted in a spiritual context by religious individuals. One explanation for the near-death experience is that it represents an adaptation to a situation in which reduced oxygen and/or extreme stress may be present. Increased DA transmission is a major feature of the brain during hypoxia, and hypoxia at birth is one of several early-developmental risk factors for schizophrenia in which DA levels are elevated. Upward eye movements and auditory and visual hallucinations are additional correlates of hypoxia. For example, intense and bizarre dreams and hallucinations frequently occur during loss of consciousness in pilots exposed to high-G forces and during hypoxia induced at high altitude in mountain climber. The putative roles of glutamate and possibly the endorphins in the near-death experience may also be mediated by their actions on DA. Phencyclidine (PCP) and ketamine, two drugs that can lead to out-of-body and mystical experiences bind with opioid, glutamatergic, D2 dopaminergic and other receptors with the glutamatergic and other non-DA actions ultimately expressed via DA pathways. What is unclear from science at this point, and what might never be understood is this: Is conversion a response to an increase in DA, making the person more susceptible to a belief in a higher power, or did the increase in DA create a brain environment that allowed the person to see a higher power that was there all the time? Or did God actually intervene, DA or no? Scientists however continue to climb the mountain of knowledge searching for answers. But when scientists reach the pinnacle, theologians will be there waiting. Whether it's called religion, spirituality, or neuropsychological religiosity, religion offers something essential to the human spirit. Therefore God may be dead but religion is here to stay. For human development, religions should be criticized with facts and rationale, not insulted with indecency. The organized religions were instituted by primitive people based on their knowledge and experience at that time.
Conclusions
In conclusion, neuropharmacological studies generally point to dopaminergic activation as the leading neurochemical feature associated with religious activity. The ventral dopaminergic pathways involved in religious behavior most closely align with the action-extrapersonal system in the model of 3-D perceptual–motor interactions. These pathways are biased toward distant (especially upper) space and also mediate related extrapersonally dominated brain functions such as dreaming and hallucinations. Hyperreligiosity is a major feature of mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, temporal-lobe epilepsy and related disorders, in which the ventromedial dopaminergic systems are highly activated and exaggerated attentional or goal-directed behavior toward extrapersonal space occurs. The evolution of religion is linked to an expansion of dopaminergic systems in humans, brought about by changes in diet and other physiological influences. Religious behavior—and especially those experiences that have occurred and continue to occur in the most spiritually oriented individuals—are largely a product of the extrapersonal brain systems that predominate in the ventromedial cortex and rely heavily on dopaminergic transmission. By contrast, systems dealing more with body-oriented space in parietal and other dorsal brain areas and predominantly utilizing serotonergic and noradrenergic circuits appear to be less activated during religious behavior. Like the extrapersonal systems and other phenomena mediated by them such as dreams and hallucinations, religion appears to be biased toward distant (upper) space and time, although the left-hemispheric predominance shown for dreams and hallucinations has yet to be proven for religious behavior. Mild elevations of DA or ventromedial cortical activity can shift the balance toward extrapersonal space and promote a belief in paranormal and spiritual phenomena, whereas more extreme imbalances can lead to the religious delusions and obsessions found in various clinical disorders. There is no evidence, however, that specific brain regions or mechanisms are devoted to religious activity per se. Rather, religion appears to have co-evolved with other DA-mediated phenomena such as abstract reasoning. The same extrapersonal phenomena (e.g., out-of-body experiences, delusions of grandiosity, and obsessiveness) may have different interpretations and themes in individuals and societies of a religious versus nonreligious persuasion. Although the neuropsychology of religion has become a topic of greater interest in recent years, religion is arguably still under-researched as a brain phenomenon relative to language, visual perception, music, and even mathematics. Nevertheless, religious and paranormal beliefs, experiences and practices can be readily explored by means of attention and bisection paradigms (to measure spatial biases), probabilistic tasks, trait scales such as religiosity, magical ideation, and schizotypy, animal models (e.g., superstitious behavior), and numerous neuroscientific measurement techniques.