A new study premised on the idea that “cognitive resources, like our physical resources, are limited” has found that prayer helps block some of the effects of cognitive depletion. First, researchers asked participants to watch funny videos while stifling “all emotional responses, verbal and non-verbal, to the content … [which] requires a good amount of cognitive energy to pull off successfully.” Then, another experiment further tested participants’ brainpower:
The second, called a stroop task, asked participants to indicate the ink color of various words flashed to them on a computer screen. The trick is that the words spell the names of various colors that are either consistent or inconsistent with the ink they are to identify. Check it out here. You’ll find that the inconsistent word/ink items are harder to respond to than the consistent items. Researchers have found that after cognitive depletion, this task becomes even harder. So, the authors had an elegant methodological question: will people who pray be able to avoid the depleting effects of emotion suppression and not show a deficit on the stroop task? In other words, will prayer give them the cognitive strength to perform well on both these challenging tasks?
Indeed it did.
Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not.
Paul Fidalgo suggests that the methodology was slightly flawed:
Certainly it’s more difficult to perform intellectual tasks following an emotional drain, but it doesn’t surprise me at all that folks would perform better on the intellectual exercise after a short period of mindfulness or meditation. The study happens to label the activity as “prayer,” but it sounds to me that they just got 5 minutes to relax and reset their brains in a concentrated and intentional manner, as opposed to the less formal “think about something else for 5 minutes” control group.
Meanwhile, another recent study examined the brains of children and grandchildren of participants in an earlier study about depression and found a link between religiosity and thicker brain cortices:
Overall, the researchers found that the importance of religion or spirituality to an individual – but not church attendance – was tied to having a thicker cortex. The link was strongest among those at high risk of depression.
The Dish 