When and How Did the Brain First Invent the Idea of Gods?

Key points

Spirituality may be a specific processing capability that developed following a change in the brain's wiring.

This may have happened about 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens demonstrated changes in burial practice.

Changes in specific brain regions may have evolved to encourage altruistic behaviors that benefit others.

Religious thought and spiritual behaviors appear to have emerged explicitly in humans. Spirituality may represent a specific processing capability that constitutes a sudden, major transition in the evolution of the brain’s cognitive abilities. It is thought that the ability to imagine counterfactual world scenarios, i.e., a logically absurd world of supernatural causes and beings, was achieved only by humans. Recent archaeological and neurobiological evid