What Happens To The Brain During Spiritual Experiences

Spiritual practices have long been hallmarks of mutual aid groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Spirituality can be a crucial component of addiction rehabilitation because it can be a key method for a person seeking recovery to connect to something outside of themselves. Researchers and trend watchers have found that Americans are becoming less religious while yet identifying as more spiritual. Spiritual participation can help people achieve a “sense of unity with something larger than themselves,” according to the study's authors. Scientists used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine exactly how spirituality activated or deactivated certain regions of the brain, changing how people perceive and interact with the world around them, in a recent brain study directed by Dr. Mark Potenza at Yale called Neural Correlates of Spiritual Experiences.

Spirituality, according to Dr. Christina Puchalski, Director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, is “the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose, as well as the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, self, others, nature, and the significant or sacred.” Importantly, the study's authors endorsed a wide range of personal definitions of spiritual experience, such as attending a religious service at a place of worship, connecting with nature, practicing mindfulness meditation, and praying in silence.

Spirituality and religious practices are important in many people's lives; 81 percent of adults in the United States identify as spiritual, religious, or both. Despite the fact that the majority of adults in the United States engage in some type of spiritual practice, little is known about what happens in specific areas of the brain during these spiritual experiences. Although studies have related various brain measures to characteristics of spirituality, none have attempted to investigate spiritual experiences directly, especially when employing a broader, modern understanding of spirituality that is not necessarily religious. This study examined neuronal structures and systems that are activated when we participate in spiritual practice using an unique type of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). When individuals were asked to recall spiritual experiences, the fMRI was able to detect activity in the brain by detecting variations in blood flow to various regions of the brain.

The large range of spiritual experiences that individuals can find personally meaningful is a possible difficulty in this study. The study's authors attempted to address this by asking participants to describe a circumstance in which they felt “a deep connection with a higher power or a spiritual presence” using a tailored guided-imagery fMRI approach. Their stories were put into a script, which was then recorded and played back to the subject during the fMRI scan. The brain activation recorded during a participant's recall of a spiritual encounter was compared to measures conducted while they listened to narrations of neutral and stressful situations.

The fact that the participants were entirely in charge of their narratives was crucial to the researchers' ability to find patterns in brain activity across a wide range of spiritual experiences.

The Inferior Parietal Lobe, which is related with perceptual processing, is shown in blue.

Lower levels of activity in some areas of the brain were linked to spiritual experiences:

• The IPL, or inferior parietal lobe, is a region of the brain that deals with perceptual processing and the notion of self in time and place.
• The emotional and sensory processing centers of the brain, the thalamus and striatum

This research adds to a growing body of knowledge about spirituality and its relationship to brain processing. These findings suggest that spiritual encounters alter perception and can help to mitigate the negative consequences of stress on mental health. The areas of the brain responsible for stress were shown to be less active in this study, whereas the parts responsible for social interaction were more active. A sense of belonging to someone or something bigger than oneself, as well as community involvement, have been shown to help people recover from substance use disorders and other behavioral health concerns.

Marc Potenza, MD, PhD, is a Psychiatrist who specializes in Behavioral addictions, and his work at Yale in this essential area is a welcome addition to the field's researchers. Spiritual Engagement in Drug Use Disorder Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery: Neural Correlates of Spiritual Experiences has promising implications for spiritual engagement in substance use disorder prevention, treatment, and recovery. Participants were scanned while reminiscing about their own unique spiritual experience, but the results were consistent across the board. This means that in order to reap the advantages, a person does not need to engage in a specific sort of spiritual practice, but rather can engage in whichever version of participation is most compatible with their particular views. This encourages patients to engage in a variety of spiritual activities as part of their treatment and rehabilitation programs.

Spirituality helps alleviate stress and create emotions of closeness, according to this study, which established a means to assess and illustrate what many recovery and treatment communities have known for years. Fellowship and treatment programs can empower individuals in recovery to use spirituality as a proven method to improve their mental health by learning what parts of the brain are affected during spiritual practice.

How does spirituality affect your brain?

Functional MRI scans have been utilized in prior research on the brain's role in spirituality, indicating that certain brain areas “light up” when people recall a past spiritual experience, for example. Ferguson's team used this data to connect the sites of patients' brain lesions to specific brain circuitry.

What happens when you have a spiritual experience?

A spiritual experience is defined as an occurrence that is beyond human comprehension in terms of how it may have occurred in the first place. Situations like avoiding death in an otherwise deadly situation or incomprehensible monetary gain are examples of these types of encounters. Another example is looking back in time to see how things unfolded in ways you could never have imagined. While you may not have had a “burning bush” encounter, you should be aware that spiritual experiences are not one-size-fits-all. Here are some suggestions to help you determine if you experienced a spiritual encounter or not.

Which part of the brain controls spirituality?

The research found that activity in the parietal cortex, a part of the brain involved in self-awareness and attention processing, appears to be a common feature across people who have had a range of spiritual experiences.

What happens to the brain during worship?

And your reality scans show that persons who spend a lot of time praying or meditating develop a dark spot in their parietal lobe, which is responsible for creating a sense of self. According to one study, these individuals may be rewriting neuronal connections in their brains, changing how they perceive the environment.

What happens to the brain during enlightenment?

The experience of capital-e Enlightenment is remarkable because of how people anecdotally describe it and how it affects the brain. Whatever sensation comes with Enlightenment — whether it's light, music, or color — it's usually the most vivid one a person has ever had with that aspect. And the limbic system, which processes emotion, and the parietal lobe, which organizes our sensory input to generate experiences of time, place, and self, reflect this intensity.

People who have experienced Enlightenment typically report losing their sense of self, and scientific investigation reveals that this impression is caused by brain activity. While religious figures such as Mother Teresa and the Buddha are often connected with Enlightenment, Newberg claims that people from all walks of life encounter essence-changing occurrences – sometimes while strolling down the street.

Furthermore, pharmaceutical medications like as LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms can be used to intentionally generate these experiences. While these experiences may appear to be out of the ordinary in so-called real life, Dr. Newberg contends that humans are hard-wired to have them. Perhaps Enlightenment experiences are like to a pair of glasses, he suggests: we are born with poor vision until we receive corrected lenses. In terms of epistemology, whether these lenses are applied to our eyes or our brains may be irrelevant.

What is the God spot?

Scientists believe the human brain contains a “God spot,” a separate part of the brain dedicated to spirituality. Spirituality is a complex phenomenon, according to University of Missouri experts, and multiple parts of the brain are responsible for the many facets of spiritual experiences. MU researchers reproduced their findings from a prior study that showed spiritual transcendence is linked to lower right parietal lobe activity. In addition, the researchers discovered that enhanced frontal lobe activity is linked to various areas of spiritual functioning.

How do you describe spiritual experience?

Spirituality is a vast topic with many different interpretations. In general, it entails a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself, as well as a quest for purpose in life. As a result, it is a universal human experience that affects all of us. A spiritual experience might be described as sacred, sublime, or simply as a strong sense of aliveness and connectivity.

Some people may discover that their spiritual lives are intertwined with their affiliation with a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. Others may turn to prayer or a personal relationship with God or a higher force for comfort. Others look for significance in their relationships with nature or art. Your unique concept of spirituality, like your sense of purpose, may evolve through time as you adjust to new experiences and relationships.

How common are spiritual experiences?

According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you've experienced at least one spiritual encounter – an overwhelming sense that you've touched God or entered another realm of reality.

So, have you ever pondered if such experiences were all in your brain or if they genuinely happened? According to scientists, the answer might be both.

Jeff Schimmel is the man to talk to if you're looking for proof that religion is all in your head. The 49-year-old writer was raised in a Conservative Jewish household in Los Angeles. But he didn't believe in God until he was touched by something outside of himself.

Schimmel had a benign tumor removed from his left temporal lobe about a decade ago. The operation went off without a hitch. But, unbeknownst to him, he began to have mini-seizures soon after. In his thoughts, he could hear conversations. People around him would occasionally appear slightly surreal, as if they were animated.

Then there were the visions. He recalls looking up at the ceiling twice while lying in bed and seeing a swirl of blue, gold, and green hues that gradually settled into a shape. He was baffled as to what it was.

What happens to your brain when you speak in tongues?

Scientists know relatively little about what happens when people “talk in tongues,” despite the fact that the practice has been around for thousands of years. Glossolalia is currently seen among Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian cults, where those who are affected feel they are speaking directly to God. Glossolalia has been caught on brain scans, according to experts, who link diminished frontal lobe activity to a loss of self-control.

Psychiatrist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues selected five African-American women from a local Pentecostal congregation to participate in the study. For the previous 5 years, they had all been speaking in tongues “nearly on a regular basis,” according to Newberg. Subjects stood and sang gospel hymns with musical accompaniment as a control activity, swinging their arms and swaying. The researchers next invited them to replicate the activity, but this time they were urged to speak in tongues instead of singing.

In each example, the researchers gave the participants an intravenous injection of a radioactive tracer, which served as a kind of freeze-frame of which brain areas were most active throughout the behavior, as seen by increased blood flow. The women's brains were then scanned in a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanner to record this.

The team reveals in the November issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging that Glossolalia caused a considerably different pattern of brain activity than singing. According to Newberg, the most significant change was a decline in frontal lobe function. “The region of the brain that ordinarily gives them a sense of control has been turned off.” Increased activity in the parietal region of the brain, which “takes sensory input and tries to develop a sense of self and how you relate to the rest of the world,” according to Newberg, was another significant alteration. Speaking in tongues requires losing control while receiving a “really intense experience of how the self relates to God,” according to Newberg. He points out that the glossolalia reactions were the polar opposite of those reported in meditative participants. Newberg discovered that when people meditate on a religious object, their frontal brain activity increases while their parietal activity decreases. This is consistent with the idea that in meditation, one maintains a steady focus without losing one's sense of self.

According to psychologist Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, who has done brainwave research with glossolalia, “it's an amazing study.” “Each of Dr. Newberg's findings has its own set of ramifications,” he explains. Increased parietal activity, for example, would correspond to a feeling of being “touched by the spirit.”

What is the scientific explanation for the intense religious experiences?

The scientific study of the neurological correlates of religious or spiritual beliefs, experiences, and activities is referred to as “neurotheology.” Others prefer to use terminology like “spiritual neuroscience” or “religious neuroscience.” Researchers in the field are attempting to understand the neurological underpinnings of religious experiences like: