SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES ACTIVATE BRAIN REWARD CIRCUITS

Religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, reportresearchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine. The findings will be published Nov. 29 in the journal Social Neuroscience.

“We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believersinterpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and neuroradiologist JeffAnderson. “In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that areletting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.”

Specifically, the investigators set out to determine which brain networks are involved inrepresenting spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons, by creating an environment thattriggered participants to “feel the Spirit.” Identifying this feeling of peace and closeness with Godin oneself and others is a critically important part of Mormons’ lives — they make decisionsbased on these feelings; treat them as confirmation of doctrinal principles; and view them as aprimary means of communication with the divine.

During fMRI scans, 19 young-adult church members — including seven females and 12 males —performed four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. The hour-longexam included six minutes of rest; six minutes of audiovisual control (a video detailing theirchurch’s membership statistics); eight minutes of quotations by Mormon and world religious leaders; eight minutes of reading familiar passagesfrom the Book of Mormon; 12 minutes of audiovisual stimuli (church-produced video of family and Biblical scenes, and other religiouslyevocative content); and another eight minutes of quotations.

During the initial quotations portion of the exam, participants — each a former full-time missionary — were shown a series of quotes, eachfollowed by the question “Are you feeling the spirit?” Participants responded with answers ranging from “not feeling” to “very strongly feeling.”

Researchers collected detailed assessments of the feelings of participants, who, almost universally, reported experiencing the kinds of feelingstypical of an intense worship service. They described feelings of peace and physical sensations of warmth. Many were in tears by the end of thescan. 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 graduatestudent at the University of Utah.

Based on fMRI scans, the researchers found that powerful spiritual feelings were reproduciblyassociated with activation in the nucleus accumbens, a critical brain region for processingreward. Peak activity occurred about 1-3 seconds before participants pushed the button and wasreplicated in each of the four tasks. As participants were experiencing peak feelings, their heartsbeat faster and their breathing deepened.

In addition to the brain’s reward circuits, the researchers found that spiritual feelings wereassociated with the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a complex brain region that is activated bytasks involving valuation, judgment and moral reasoning. Spiritual feelings also activated brainregions associated with focused attention.

“Religious experience is perhaps the most influential part of how people make decisions thataffect all of us, for good and for ill. Understanding what happens in the brain to contribute tothose decisions is really important,” says Anderson, noting that we don’t yet know if believers ofother religions would respond the same way. Work by others suggests that the brain respondsquite differently to meditative and contemplative practices characteristic of some easternreligions, but so far little is known about the neuroscience of western spiritual practices.

The study is the first initiative of the Religious Brain Project, launched by a group of University ofUtah researchers in 2014, which aims to understand how the brain operates in people with deepspiritual and religious beliefs.

-Written by Natalie Dicou, Communications Specialist, University of Utah Health Sciences

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In addition to Anderson and Ferguson, co-authors include Jared Nielsen from Harvard University, and Jace King, Li Dai, Danielle Giangrasso,Rachel Holman, and Julie Korenberg from the University of Utah.

The study was funded by the Davis Endowed Chair in Radiology at the University of Utah, and the National Institute of Mental Health, andpublished as “Reward, Salience, and Attentional Networks are Activated by Religious Experience in Devout Mormons” in Social Neuroscience onNov. 29, 2016.