Manifestations, social impact, and decay of conceptual beliefs: A cultural perspective.

Introduction: Believing comprises multifaceted processes that integrate information from the outside world through meaning-making processes with personal relevance.

Methods: Qualitative Review of the current literature in social cognitive neuroscience.

Results: Although believing develops rapidly outside an individual's conscious awareness, it results in the formation of beliefs that are stored in memory and play an important role in determining an individual's behavior.

Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives.

The processes of believing integrate external perceptual information from the environment with internal emotional states and prior experience to generate probabilistic neural representations of events, i.e., beliefs.

Belief formation - A driving force for brain evolution.

The topic of belief has been neglected in the natural sciences for a long period of time. Recent neuroscience research in non-human primates and humans, however, has shown that beliefs are the neuropsychic product of fundamental brain processes that attribute affective meaning to concrete objects and events, enabling individual goal setting, decision making and maneuvering in the environment. With regard to the involved neural processes they can be categorized as empirical, relational, and conceptual beliefs.

Processes of believing: Where do they come from? What are they good for?

Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attributes of personal meaning and value and thereby guides individuals' behavior.