Spiritual Experiences Activate Reward Circuits of the Brain

Amy Taylor December 20, 2016

Researchers from the University of Utah School of Medicine examined how the human brain responds when a person goes through spiritual experiences. They found that they actually activate the parts of the brain that are activated when one experiences love, sex, music, gambling and other ‘feel good’ activities.

In the study, 19 young-adult church members, of which 7 are women and 12 are men, went through fMRI scans as they performed four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. The test included 6-munite rest, audio-visual control (6 minutes), quotations by Mormon and world religious leaders (8 minutes), reading familiar passages from the Book of Mormon (8 minutes), audio-visual stimuli (12 minutes), and quotations (8 minutes).

Researchers collected detailed assessments of the feelings of participants, who, almost universally, reported experiencing the kinds of feelings typical of an intense worship service. They described feelings of peace and physical sensations of warmth. Many were in tears by the end of the scan. In one experiment, participants pushed a button when they felt a peak spiritual feeling while watching church-produced stimuli.

The researchers found that powerful spiritual feelings were reproducibly associated with activation in the nucleus accumbens, a critical brain region for processing reward. Peak activity occurred about 1-3 seconds before participants pushed the button and was replicated in each of the four tasks. As participants were experiencing peak feelings, their hearts beat faster and their breathing deepened.

They also found that spiritual feelings were associated with the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a complex brain region that is activated by tasks involving valuation, judgment and moral reasoning. Spiritual feelings also activated brain regions associated with focused attention.

"We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent," said eff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study.

"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,"

Their findings were published in the journal Social Neuroscience.

Source of this article:

Michael A. Ferguson et al, Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons

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