Religious and spiritual feelings activate the brain's reward circuits just the way the experiences such as music, love and drugs do, reports a recent study.
Brain And Spiritual Feelings
Jeff Anderson, the senior author of the study, said that with the recent technological advancements, researchers are able to understand the participation of brain in the spiritual and transcendent feelings experienced by people.
The brain imaging technologies are well advanced in recent years, and that let researchers to search for answers on questions that are prevailing for thousands of years, noted Anderson.
For the purpose of the study, the researchers focused at identifying the brain networks involved while spiritual feelings are experienced in a group of devout Mormons. The Mormons were stimulated to experience the feeling of the spirit in the experimental settings.
About 19 church members, including 12 young males and seven young females, were involved in the study. FMRI scans were done while they performed four different tasks that are designed to trigger their spiritual feelings.
Brain Activity Experiment In Devout Mormons
An hour-long examination started with resting for six minutes, listening to audio explaining the church's statistics for six minutes, listening to quotations from religious leaders around the world and other Mormons for eight minutes, reading passages from the Book of Mormon for eight minutes, watching a video containing biblical scenes and sensitive religious content for 12 minutes and listening to other familiar quotations for eight minutes.
During the start of the session, the participants were shown a set of quotes and were questioned if they were feeling the spirit. The subjects gave wide range of replies from "not feeling" to "very strongly feeling."
The brain activity of the participants who reported to have had the ultimate devotional feeling, and those that felt the intense warmth of divinity was assessed by the researchers. A number of participants ended up in tears with the spiritual experience when the scan was over. The subjects also pressed a button in one of the tasks when they felt the peak of spirituality.
Devotional Feeling Activates Nucleus Accumbens
Assessing the fMRI scans, the researchers noted that the nucleus accumbens, a region that is involved in processing of rewards in brain, was activated in participants' brain during their strong spiritual experience. The participant's feelings reached the peak between one and three seconds before they pressed the button.
It is also noted that the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain involved in moral reasoning, judgment and valuation was also associated with the devotional experience.
"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," said Anderson in a press release.
The study is published in the journal Social Neuroscience on Nov. 29.
