What Happens in the Brain During a Spiritual Experience?
Orange County, CA - November 14th, 2018 - Most people say that at some point in their life, they’ve had a Spiritual experience. A spiritual experience serves you in some way. It makes you more aware, expands your consciousness, and connects you with a part of you that doesn’t require physical power to justify it. A spiritual experience can be moments when a greater sense of meaningfulness, peacefulness, or connection with the world around you.
A team of researchers from the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, at the Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City, NY, and the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, used an MRI to discover what happens in the Brain of individuals as they picture an intense spiritual experience.
“Spiritual experiences are robust states that may have profound impacts on people’s lives. Understanding the neural bases of spiritual experiences may help us better understand their roles in resilience and recovery from mental health and addictive disorders,” said Marc Potenza, professor of psychiatry, of the Yale Child Study Center, and of neuroscience.
The participants support different spiritual and religious practices. The first experiment, they were asked to recall a personal spiritual experience as their brains were scanned. Since they all had widely different spiritual traditions, the response of the experience showed a broad range such as "a two-way relationship with a higher power" all the way to "being in a zone of intense physical activity, sudden awareness, bodily felt connectivity, meditation, or prayer." The study results are published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
Researchers also compared the volunteer’s brain activity while they described a spiritual experience versus the brain activity shown while they imagined a stressful experience, that didn’t trigger any strong emotions. They found that the inferior parietal lobe was less active when they were describing a spiritual event, although the activity in that brain region increased when they thought of a stressful experience. The team theorizes that this area may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences.
“Continuing to build our empirical understanding of how spiritual experiences are mediated by the brain and the future extension of similar studies to clinical populations could help facilitate the judicious integration of spirituality into treatment and prevention in areas of mental health conditions," said researchers.
The study only included 27 participants between 18-27 years old that were in good physical and Mental Health. Since the study was small, more research is required.
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