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important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in practicing Catholics and avowed atheists and agnostics during painful stimulation, here we show the existence of a context-dependent form of analgesia that intensity of pain. These include diversion of attention [6,29,35] as well as more high-level cognitive processes such as placebo-induced analgesia [19,23,32], emotional detachment [14] or perceived control over pain [26,33]. In contrast to the attentional modulation of pain, thes