The role of spirituality and religion in healing both physical and emotional illness is currently a hot topic in professional journals and the media. Some studies covering the topic have found:

• Depression, and other psychological disorders, increase in line with a decline in religious observance.
• Those with a strong spiritual or religious base are healthier both physically and mentally.
• Depression is more prevalent in those who lack spiritual practices or religious beliefs.

People with depression and anxiety (which are actually two sides of the same coin) need two things: to feel safe and to escape the narrow depressive self by connecting to a larger, more harmonious, reality. According to researchers, our brains have inbuilt mechanisms to help us do exactly that. However, in our stressful, competitive, consumerist and image-obsessed modern society, most of us have forgotten how.

But what do we mean by religion and spirituality? They are different but not exclusive concepts, according to William Hathaway PhD, of Regent University in Virginia. Religion usually involves belief in a power greater than yourself and spirituality includes connection to other people, your body, nature and the Divine. Recent research has shown that each of these experiences relates to different parts of the brain which, although separate, interact with each other.

Optimism and the God module

The first indication that we are hard-wired for religious belief came with the announcement on 31 October 1997 by neuroscientists working at the University of California in San Diego that they had found a small region in the brain which specialised in processing religious belief. This God module, as the lead researcher, Vilayanur S Ramachandran, called it, is located in the left temporal lobe just behind the forehead and also governs attention and focus. When words related to religion and faith are used, this area lights up and becomes very active.

Announcing his teams findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, Ramachandran said, We suggest there are neural circuits in the temporal lobe that may be part of the machinery of the brain that is involved in mystical experiences and God.

Since every society on earth has or has had a religious belief system of some kind, there must be benefits from having a faith in a transcendental being, whether that being is a personal god, the spirit of an ancestor or animal, a symbolic god or simply nature. There seems to be a deep-seated need to have, in the words of the old Gershwin song, someone to watch over me.

Imagine two bands of early hunter-gatherers: the Mbane and the Mbake. The Mbane have a fully developed animist religion that worships ancestors, animal spirits, the gods of the forest, mountains, streams and sky and, over all, the Earth Mother who watches over everything. The Mbane perform rituals and dances to make the rains come, stop the floods and attract the gnu (a form of antelope). The Mbake, in contrast, are led by a council of atheists. They scorn the whole idea of spirits, gods and Mother Earth. They are rationalists with a materialist bent. When the drought comes and forest fires swallow up the smaller game and devour the grasses that draw the gnu, which band will survive to become our ancestors? Almost certainly the Mbane will, because their faith gives them the optimism that, eventually, if they do the right dances and make the right offerings, the spirits will provide: the rains will come, the gnu will return.