Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual Experiences
Lisa Miller, Iris M. Balodis, Clayton H. Mcclintock, Jiansong Xu, Cheryl Lacadie, Rajita Sinha, Marc N. Potenza
Cerebral Cortex May 14, 2018 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhy102 via OpenAlex
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractPeople across cultures and throughout history report spiritual experiences that involve a sense of union transcending the ordinary self, but their neural mechanisms are poorly understood. Using an individualized guided-imagery task, the authors compared brain activity during personally meaningful spiritual experiences with that during stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. During spiritual experiences, the left inferior parietal lobule showed reduced activity compared to neutral-relaxing experiences, suggesting this region contributes to perceptual processing and self-other representations. Compared to stress cues, spiritual cues reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions linked to sensory and emotional processing. The findings point to neural mechanisms underlying broadly defined, personally experienced spirituality.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Experimental study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Human participants |
| Intervention | stressful |
| Keywords | Spirituality Perception Cognitive psychology Inferior parietal lobule Psychology of self |
| Citations | 65 |
| Key finding | Spiritual experiences, compared to neutral-relaxing ones, were associated with reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting its role in self-other representations during such experiences. |
Abstract
Across cultures and throughout history, human beings have reported a variety of spiritual experiences and the concomitant perceived sense of union that transcends one's ordinary sense of self. Nevertheless, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of spiritual experiences, particularly when examined across different traditions and practices. By adapting an individualized guided-imagery task, we investigated neural correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences as compared with stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. We observed in the spiritual condition, as compared with the neutral-relaxing condition, reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), a result that suggests the IPL may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences. Compared with stress cues, responses to spiritual cues showed reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing. Overall, the study introduces a novel method for investigating brain correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences and suggests neural mechanisms associated with broadly defined and personally experienced spirituality.