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This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
I recently visited Mexico City and paid a visit to the National Museum of Anthropology.
In a series of chambers, the museum depicts the rise and fall of various cultures in Mexico's history.
One thing that struck me was the staggering range of religious beliefs that rose to prominence and then faded away over the centuries.
The temple of the feathered serpent, for example, was a major religious center at Teotihuacan.
Built around 2000 years ago, the magnificent pyramid likely paid homage to a storm God.
When archaeologists explored the structure, they found it concealed horrors.
Among them, a series of skeletons bound at the wrists and laid symmetrically side by side.
Victims possibly sacrificed to soothe an angry deity.
Sometime later, I came by an account of another storm God.
This God, worshipped centuries earlier in ancient Greece, had a dramatic origin story.
The Titan Kronos, the son of Uranus and mother Earth, is believed to have castrated and deposed his father.
Fearful that his children would do the same to him, he ate them all except Zeus, who went on to overthrow him and become one of the most important gods of ancient Greece.
Zeus had many powers.
Among them the ability to control the weather.
Around the world, we see a staggering range of religious faiths as well as similarities in beliefs in very different times and places.
Given the ubiquity of these beliefs, psychologists have long speculated about how these beliefs shape and are shaped by the human mind.
Today, we explore features in the brain that are intimately tied to our capacity for religious belief.