Actually it memorizing huge texts is part of some forms of education. The memorization of pre-Christianity Greek and Roman authors was part of european classical education, and it was obviously not for the religious side. Theater actors also memorize very long texts for not religious reasons.

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The study's object is the effect of memorization. The religious aspect is not part of it. The participants were:

Forty-two male volunteers participated in the study conducted at the National Brain Research Center in India. Twenty-one professionally qualified Pandits were recruited from government-supported Vedic Pandit schools in the greater New Delhi (India) area.

and

Twenty-one control volunteers were recruited to match the Pandit population in gender, age (Mpandits = 21.7; SD = 2.8 vs. Mcontrols = 22.8; SD = 3.6, T-test, P = .3) and number of languages spoken (Mpandits = 3.1; SD = 0.8 vs. Mcontrols = 3.1; SD = 1.3, T-test, P = .9). Participants in the control group were members of India's National Brain Research Centre community or students from a nearby technical college.

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The study's conclusion is:

the results raise interesting questions about the potential of intensive, specialized expertise training to substantially drive plasticity in healthy adult brains, and possibly alter natural developmental curves.

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Despite its framing, the article author's actually admits it:

Although this initial research, focused on intergroup comparison of brain structure, could not directly address the Sanskrit effect question (that requires detailed functional studies with cross-language memorization comparisons, for which we are currently seeking funding), we found something specific about intensive verbal memory training.

Other parts of the article are speculative, and integrated in storytelling. As an example, the last paragraph: "If so, the training might need to be exact" is an hypothesis based on an anecdote, and does not refer to existing studies.