Prefrontal Brain Lesions Reveal Magical Ideation Arises from Enhanced Religious Experiences

Magical ideation refers to beliefs about causality that lack an empirical basis, and although it overlaps conceptually with religious belief, the neural mechanisms connecting the two had not been investigated in patients with brain lesions. Combining lesion mapping, neuropsychological testing, and mediation analysis in 117 Vietnam veterans with penetrating traumatic brain injury and 32 matched healthy controls, this study related scores on the Magical Ideation Scale to a measure of personal religious experience. Magical ideation was positively associated with religious experience only among the brain-injured participants, and lesion analyses indicated that prefrontal damage raised magical ideation indirectly, by increasing religious experience — while the reverse pathway found no support. The results suggest that suppression of prefrontal function opens people to religious experience, which in turn sustains magical belief, clarifying how the frontal lobes differentially modulate two related forms of supernatural thinking with implications for the study of religion in peace and conflict.