By Hans-Ferdinand Angel, Rüdiger J. Seitz

Introduction 

“What am I able to know?” is the question highlighted by Kant [1], which is considered a ground-breaking milestone for the emergence of the Enlightenment. What people believe they know is typically stated verbally as propositions from a first-person perspective. This accords with the notion held in philosophy since the Antiquity that knowledge is justified belief [2]. Novel findings in cognitive neuroscience show that beliefs are the product of brain processes that are brought about by fast-evolving neural processes outside conscious awareness [3]. Importantly, putative mechanisms for belief formation are a high rate of exposure to external information, the ease of processing this information, and the attribution of a feeling of truth to it [4]. Nevertheless, hitherto held beliefs may be modified or even suspended if new empirical findings invalidate what was previously accepted [5]. On a behavioral level, this pertains to what people do in daily life and beyond that to the concepts and theories elaborated in the sciences. The intention or our perspective is twofold. First, we want to emphasize the relevance of the topic of credition in the psychobiological context, and second, we demonstrate how our interdisciplinary approach to believing [6] aligns with the well-established field of cognitive neuroscience research. 

Until some years ago, the study of beliefs was mainly assumed incompatible with the natural sciences [7]. However, the notion of “belief” has recently attracted increasing interest in the scientific literature. Moreover, its scope has expanded to include social behavior, cognition, and the evolution of human culture, as can be seen in the proceedings of an international conference on the nature of beliefs and believing [8]. With regard to questions such as “What sort of images or narratives do people believe?”, “What do notions such as democracy, religion, equality, freedom or science mean to them”, and “How do people value them?”, it has been argued that beliefs act as fundamental hypotheses about the world that are held with varying degrees of certainty [9]. Accordingly, beliefs are not limited to propositions expressed by consciously aware, rational agents, but are also determinants that bias people’s spontaneous and intuitive behavior [10]. Notably, however, the underlying worldviews can be quite different among people. This is true even within relatively coherent Western or Asian societies. On a global scale, these worldviews may be expected to be even contradictory. 

The processes of believing that underlie people’s worldviews have been termed creditions (a neologistic term derived from the Latin credere, meaning to believe) [11]. Credition is a central brain function that reflects a fundamental human capacity. It interacts with other brain functions, such as perception, reinforcement learning, memory encoding and retrieval, reward/effort computations, and predictive coding of actions [12]. From early infancy, our brains process all information that comes through the senses in a probabilistic fashion [13]. Simultaneously, the incoming sensory information is associated with an emotion and encoded in memory as positive or negative, thus charging the perceived information affectively [14]. In fact, gains in reward compared to the efforts invested drive the process of so-called reinforcement learning, which is known to evolve primarily through the action of the basal ganglia [15]. This multifaceted processing occurs so quickly that it happens before we become aware of it. The empirical evidence for an unconscious processing is overwhelming [16–21]. Nevertheless, people trust their perceptions and consider them subjectively true. This information is stored as patterns of neural activity that represent the formal and affective information of each concept [22]. The key aspect of this cognition–emotion interaction is the increasing evidence that cognitive processing is subordinated to emotional processing [23, 24] and works in parallel with it [25]. Importantly, the amygdala, cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal, and the mid-ventral prefrontal are crucial for emotional processing [26]. 

As a result, the processes of believing lead to a person’s mindset or attitude, which may, nevertheless, change with new information. Importantly, these processes stabilize the individual’s worldview and through predictive coding, determine how the person acts accordingly. However, people may become aware of what they believe, which is a prerequisite for expressing it introspectively as a propositional statement (“I believe…”). Subsequently, it is possible to reason about it, communicate the contents of one’s beliefs to others, and infer from a third-person perspective what other people’s beliefs are likely to be. Cognitive feedback is the conscious reflection on what happened. This ex post reflection is in accordance with the argument that humans reason about their thoughts and beliefs [27] in the sense that the conscious explanation can be considered as an elaborate fabrication [28]. This comprehensive model of the psychophysical control of behavior accords with the executive model of action control proposed by Jeannerod [29] but also expands it. Note that creditions are not religious. This does not contradict the commonly accepted view that the notion of belief is a central focus of inquiry in the philosophy of religion. Of course, beliefs play an important role in religions. They may provide advanced within perspectives of religions [30] and be suited to improve discourse between different religions [31]. 

Similarly to other biological and psychological processes, creditions may lead to abnormal beliefs and even to somatoform or psychotic symptoms. Conversely, brain diseases can affect the processes of believing and result in abnormal beliefs beyond the disease-defining neurological deficits [32]. For example, the pathophysiology of spatial delusions that may occur in patients with hemiparesis after stroke has been elucidated using connectivity mapping in neuroimaging data [33]. 

2. Discussion 

Cognitive neuroscience has contributed to the interdisciplinary discourse on beliefs and believing through the so-called neural credition model. This psychophysical model integrates contextual information from the environment with a subject’s internal valuation of that information. Furthermore, through predictive coding, it facilitates the generation of both appropriate intuitive actions and controlled behavior, which consists of sequential and often composite actions. The model provides a novel approach to understanding the functionality of the human brain by acknowledging the evolutionary perspective of its phylogenetic development [3]. Thus, it is well suited to contribute specific aspects to the current debate regarding a modernized synthesis of the brain theory. On the behavioral level, the model corresponds to the notion of fast type 1 and slow type 2 eye and limb movements [34] and on the processing level to systems 1 and 2, as proposed by Morewedge and Kahneman [35]. The multifaceted processes of believing that act according to a feedforward model have important interrelations with other brain functions, such as learning, thinking, remembering, perceiving, and more. Some of these interrelations already have been the focus of recent research, such as the interrelations with working memory and long-term memory [12]. This accords with an earlier notion that memory implies belief as belief implies plausibility [36]. The concrete and continuous events related to belief formation and modulation have been modeled bio-mathematically within the framework of the multifaceted physio-logical–anatomical circuits in the brain [37]. This is of relevance in several fields of cognitive science, such as metacognition, attribution [38], language use, cognitive linguistics, memory [12], expectancy [39], confidence judgment, and more. 

It should be noted that the neural processes of forming and updating beliefs are multidimensional, as is the environmental information to which they pertain. Accordingly, beliefs can be categorized as empirical, relational, and conceptual. This corresponds to the three dimensions of information in the environment, such as objects, events, and narratives [40]. Empirical and relational beliefs correspond to primal beliefs that reflect a subject’s experience of the static and ever-changing environment and evolve in an unconscious, prelinguistic fashion [40]. Furthermore, language-based narratives concerning auto-biography, politics, and religion induce conceptual beliefs [41]. While primal beliefs mediate spontaneous intuitive actions, conceptual beliefs form the basis for short-term and long-term goals that people aim to achieve. This pertains to the ongoing discussion of whether humans are slaves of their autonomic brains or if they can steer their behavior voluntarily. Arguments based on the complex psychophysical experiment by Libet et al. [42] have failed to resolve this discussion, as highlighted by recent neurophysiological data and theoretical considerations [43]. Although the view presented here concurs with the hypothesis that concepts are not represented in the mind but become manifest in materiality [44], we advocate the cognitive neuroscience perspective that beliefs are represented by neural activity in the brain. This perspective also applies to each aspect of the entire neural credition function, including when people become aware of what they believe, express it verbally, and communicate it to others. 

Despite advancements in the understanding of the nature of beliefs, their appreciation in the public is limited. For their underestimated role, a couple of reasons may be relevant. First, the long-standing debate in philosophical epistemology has not reached broader public interest. Conversely, beliefs are often associated with religion and as a result, seem to fade from contemporary societies due to the consequent secularization of the Western world. In a knowledge-adherent society where empirical data are seen as the basis for any assessment of reliability, the implicit relevance of beliefs has become a blind spot in perception. Thus, despite the understanding of knowledge as justified belief (see above [2]), a neglect of belief has been noted even in the sciences [5]. Nevertheless, conceptual beliefs are especially of particular relevance for the discussion of the role of beliefs in cohesion and cooperation within social groups and societies, as they are functionally and structurally related to cultural myths and social narratives [45]. Moreover, conceptual beliefs are the basis of moral judgments, which have been shown to occur when a person makes a behavioral response to a moral norm violation [46]. In fact, a cross-cultural comparison involving four studies with over 2,000 participants from different countries found that cultural models of the mind and personal orientations toward the mind shape what feels real [47]. Thus, conceptual beliefs, whose contents can be communicated in speech and in written texts, have been the basis for social cooperation and personal specialization in cultural evolution. Notably, beliefs may change over a person’s lifetime, which has been studied systematically [48]. Likewise, it has been proposed that conceptual beliefs may change differently from a person’s primal beliefs [49]. Why this is the case and under what circumstances this may occur remains the subject of future research. 

With regard to anthropological research, a theoretical model was put forward that allows for the unbiased communication of what a person believes (communication model of credition) [50]. This model is based on neologistic terms that are not confounded by the historical evolution of current languages and therefore, can be applied to various fields in an unbiased fashion. Examples of potential applications include politics, coaching, psychotherapy, decision-making, discussions on sustainability and climate change, conflict resolution, mediation, and even school lessons [51]. An example from the medical field is an investigation into the effect of the COVID-19 vaccination on patients with an affective disorder compared to healthy controls [52]. 

On a general level, the integration of credition into neurocognitive and psychobiological research can be expected to stimulate further research with the potential to open novel perspectives. It would be exciting to investigate how the concept of credition may impact our understanding of language production. Additionally, the field of value processing could offer a challenging topic to better understand how humans evaluate information from outside and inside during the believing process and which mechanisms are involved. 

3. Conclusions 

The central aspect of this overarching theory concerning belief formation and updating is that credition is a brain function at the same meta-analytic level of abstraction as cognition and emotion. It comprises a neural model of the multifaceted processes of believing that manifest outside conscious awareness and determine a person’s behavior. What people believe can be inferred from their behavior and shared with others from a third-person perspective. An unbiased description of beliefs has been formalized in a communication model. Thus, beliefs are brain products whose conceptual categories provide predictions for the evolution of human culture that can be tested by empirical studies. 

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Keywords: believing, beliefs, brain function, cognitive neuroscience, intuition