Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual 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.

Keywords: functional magnetic resonance imaging; perception; spirituality; stress.

Figure 1.

Subjective responses to the guided-imagery scripts. N = 27 participants were questioned prior to listening to their individualized script (white bars “Pre-script”) and following the script (black bars “Post-script”). (a) Subjective responses to the question “On a scale of 0–10 what was the intensity of your spiritual connection?” Participants reported significantly higher spiritual connection following the spiritual script (P < 0.05). (b) Subjective responses to the question: “On a scale of 0–10, how anxious do you feel?” Participants reported significantly higher anxiety following the stress script (P < 0.05). (c) Subjective responses to the question: “On a scale of 0–10, how vivid was that story?”.

Figure 2.

Main effect of condition and condition contrasts. Main effect of the guided-imagery scripts in the group (N = 27) during scanning (red box on left). (a) Maps depict axial views of z-levels 6 (striatum/thalamus), 34 (precuneus/superior occipital gyrus/parietal lobe), 42 (inferior parietal lobule) from figure top to bottom with significant differences across conditions. “Blue box on the right”: Between-condition differences on the guided-imagery scripts in the group (N = 27) during spiritual and stress scripts, relative to neutral-relaxing scripts and each other. Axial views show z-levels −18, −10, 6, 42 from left to right. Maps depict % blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal change in the (b) spiritual condition relative to the neutral-relaxing condition (“Spirit > Neutral”), (c) the stress condition relative to the neutral-relaxing condition (“Stress > Neutral”) and (d) the spiritual condition relative to the stress condition (“Spirit > Stress”). All maps are thresholded at an uncorrected level of P < 0.001 two-tailed and family-wise-error-corrected at P < 0.05. Red color indicates where participants show relatively greater activation, and blue color demonstrates areas where participants show relatively reduced activation. The right side of the brain is on the left.