"The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says."
Note: a company put a single Apple blogger under an MRI not as part of a study or "a report", it was one scan that was paid for by a documentary series called Secrets of the Superbrands hosted and written by comedian Alex Riley ("Britain's Really Disgusting Food" and "Movies' Greatest Cars")
The next level of this may be that those parts of a brain that fire when considering a deity's will are more highly correlated with the parts that fire when thinking one's own desires, than when thinking of the will of others.
Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself."
Apparently, the same parts of the brain are triggered.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.reli...
"The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says."