Image by Hagmann P, Cammoun L, Gigandet X, Meuli R, Honey CJ, et al. via Wikimedia Commons
In one of his most inspiring thoughts, Jalaluddin Rumi once declared that “Love is the religion and the universe is the book,” thereby combining two of the most powerful factors in human lives.
But what goes on in the human mind and brain when individuals experience love and spiritual connections or elevations has been a subject of intense discussion, with much of the interpretation findings expressions in the form of philosophical and psychological theories as well as through creative arts like music and genres of literature like poetry. The religious experience could include a wide array of processes.
Now a new study – looking at the way the brain functions at the time of spiritual experience – has found that religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love and music.
Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine, publishing their findings in the journal Social Neuroscience, say the study is a step toward long-sought understanding of how the human brain functions during spiritual experiences.
“We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and nueroradiologist Jeff Anderson.
“In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia,” he said according to a University statement.
The researchers focused on determining which brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons. As part of their work they created an environment that triggered participants to “feel the Spirit.”
For Mormons identifying this feeling of peace and closeness with God in oneself and others is a critically important partt and they make decisions based on these feelings. Mormons treat them as confirmation of doctrinal principles; and view them as a primary means of communication with the divine, the University explained releasing some of the findings.
The study included fMRI scans as19 young-adult church members — including seven females and 12 males — performed four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. The hour-long exam included six minutes of rest; six minutes of audiovisual control (a video detailing their church’s membership statistics); eight minutes of quotations by Mormon and world religious leaders; eight minutes of reading familiar passages from the Book of Mormon; 12 minutes of audiovisual stimuli (church-produced video of family and Biblical scenes, and other religiously evocative content); and another eight minutes of quotations.
The participants — each a former full-time missionary — were shown a series of quotes, each followed by the question “Are you feeling the spirit?” Participants responded with answers ranging from “not feeling” to “very strongly feeling.”
In the next step, researchers collected detailed assessments of the feelings of participants, who, almost universally, reported experiencing the kinds of feelings typical of an intense worship service. They described feelings of peace and physical sensations of warmth. Many were in tears by the end of the scan. In one experiment, participants pushed a button when they felt a peak spiritual feeling while watching church-produced stimuli.
“When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded,” says lead author Michael Ferguson, who carried out the study as a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Utah.
An fMRI scanned posted with the release of the findings shows regions of the brain that become active when devoutly religious study participants have a spiritual experience, including a reward center in the brain, the nucleus accumbens.
The study of fMRI scans revealed that powerful spiritual feelings were reproducibly associated with activation in the nucleus accumbens, a critical brain region for processing reward. Peak activity occurred about 1-3 seconds before participants pushed the button and was replicated in each of the four tasks. As participants were experiencing peak feelings, their hearts beat faster and their breathing deepened.
The University said in addition to the brain’s reward circuits, the researchers found that spiritual feelings were associated with the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a complex brain region that is activated by tasks involving valuation, judgment and moral reasoning. Spiritual feelings also activated brain regions associated with focused attention.
“Religious experience is perhaps the most influential part of how people make decisions that affect all of us, for good and for ill. Understanding what happens in the brain to contribute to those decisions is really important,” says Anderson.
However, he notes that “we don’t yet know if believers of other religions would respond the same way.”
Work by others suggests that the brain responds quite differently to meditative and contemplative practices characteristic of some eastern religions, but so far little is known about the neuroscience of western spiritual practices.
According to the statement, the study is the first initiative of the Religious Brain Project, launched by a group of University of Utah researchers in 2014, which aims to understand how the brain operates in people with deep spiritual and religious beliefs.
The study may have opened a new vista into the workings of the brain during spiritual experience but it will need a lot more work to read fully what happens during such transforming moments.
