As they say, "it's all in the mind". Probably this is what led some Canadian university researchers to study the brains of people who are religious and those who aren't to find out the truth behind this saying.

"This is the first set of studies connecting individual differences in religious conviction to basic (brain) processes," say authors Michael Inzlicht and Ian McGregor, psychology professors at the University of Toronto and York University, respectively.

The study led by Inzlicht revealed that students with stronger religious fervor and greater belief in God had less activity in their anterior cingulate cortex when they made errors.

Inzlicht has compared this portion of the brain as an alarm bell.

"It fires when you've made a mistake, when something is not right, when you're facing a situation where you don't know what to do," he says.

According to Inzlicht, the more religious sorts were found out to be less likely to "have this kind of anxious uh-oh response, they were more OK with the error, they were less vigilant after they made an error."

The first study, out of two, led by Inzilcht involved 28 participants hailing from varied religious background: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and non-religious. They also went through an assessment of their religious beliefs.

The second study involved 22 participants hailing from a diverse set of ethnic and racial backgrounds: 33 per cent East Asian, 33 per cent South Asian, 28 per cent Caucasian and six per cent belonging to "other" category. Their religious affiliations were not documented, but the intensity of their belief in God was measured, ranging from "certain God exists" to "certain God does not exist."

From these studies, Inzlicht concluded that people who are more religiously inclined seem to be calmer in the face of adverse situations and generally deal with mistakes in a more composed manner.

Inzilcht opined that while on one hand this composure helps lower anxiety level, on the other hand "anxiety is actually quite important. We need it to let us know when things aren't going right. We need it to let us know when we've made errors, when we need to correct ourselves."

However, the study, published online in the journal Psychological Science, established that the more religious participants actually made fewer errors.