What Does God Look Like to You? | Brain Games

For many people, God is the strongest belief they have. But how does your brain conceive of the very idea of God? What happens when you actually try to draw the Divine? Dr. Andrew Newberg from Jefferson University Hospital has been trying to figure that out.

We've asked a few people of various ages to draw. [Music] God. Before the break, we also asked you, how do you envision the Almighty? Did it look like an old man in a cloud, a beautiful scene from nature, or something more abstract? Let's take a look at what our volunteers came up with, and then we'll reveal what your image of God says about your brain.

All right. I'm going to ask everyone to put their pencils, crayons, brushes down. Hi! What did you draw?

"I drew God in heaven, uh-huh, and like the bridge leading to heaven. Oh nice! And the sun shining down. I drew a kind of a Judeo-Christian kind of God looking over our realm."

"My home is my heaven, and you know, everything else that happens around us."

"Okay, what I think God means is that it's like, it's much more of an idea than a person. And basically, all the colors represent everyone's different ideas of what God is. What it means to me is that God is love, and that encompasses different colors."

"I drew a big question mark. A few years ago, I would have just left it blank."

Incredibly, when asked to envision God, of all the seemingly infinite possibilities, people really only draw one of three things. There are certain kind of general categories that people think about God from, and one of them is the idea of God as a kind of person. We see a face, we see eyes, we see an actual person. It's just easier for us as human beings to relate to something which is infinite in a very personal kind of way.

To start, virtually all the younger artists depict God with a face or some anthropic quality. Now, as people kind of move away from thinking about God only as a person, we start to see more of a symbol, like the cross or perhaps clouds. Then sometimes we start to see just nature itself. Finally, we start to see people moving into a more abstract way of thinking about God—different swirls, colors, a heart, even a question mark.

Was that true in your images at home? Did your picture of any higher power look like a person, or nature, or something more abstract? Science shows that the shift to more abstract thinking about God occurs around 12 years of age.

What might drive this development in your brain? According to Dr. Newberg, the vision of God as a human figure is often aligned with a wrathful, more authoritarian view of God. This picture of God may cause primitive parts of your brain to release stress-inducing neurochemicals. Changing your picture of God to something more abstract may in fact cause you to be more optimistic and faithful.

So ultimately, this tells us something about how human beings actually perceive God. Think about God. Think about God visually, which is obviously one of our most powerful senses that we use to understand our world. Maybe when it comes to your brain, the old saying is true: seeing is believing.