[Serious] Link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism established

[John 6IX Breezy]

I think the vmPFC is mostly known for its intermediate role between emotion and decision making, as well as impulse control. Anyone who has heard of the famous Phineas Gage has, as a result, heard of the consequences of damaging the vmPFC. When it comes to the also famous trolley problem (the part where you're asked to push a fat man onto the tracks), damage to the vmPFC makes people less hesitant to make the push (since its the "logical" solution). To a large extent its as if you are removing emotion from the person, leaving them only to consider the logical or theoretical approach to things.

Rather than low cognitive flexibility and openness being responsible for fundamentalist attitudes in these individuals, I do wonder if it is the lack of emotion. I'm not an expert on what fundamentalists are exactly, but the name does conjure up images of someone that thinks too strictly about religious ideas but seems to lack the emotion or empathy that would help balance those ideas out. Low flexibility and openness seem more like by-products of this biased emotion-reason interplay, than the actual root of fundamentalisms.

Regardless, others have already pointed out that the findings don't imply fundamentalists have brain damage. From what I read in the OP, the study just shows that damage to this area leads to low openness and cognitive flexibility, and that's it. How these traits manifests themselves could be highly variable; it just so happens that the researchers were looking to correlate it with religious fundamentalisms specifically. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also correlated with very strict-minded atheists as well; since you can be closed off and inflexible in whatever beliefs or ideas you hold.