What happens in the brain during a spiritual experience?

Spiritual experiences are believed to be encounters with greater truths or powers related to faith. These spiritual experiences can take many forms, depending on how each of us interprets this concept. But, What happens in the brain during a spiritual, mystical or religious experience?

The question of what happens in the brain during a spiritual experience has been explored numerous times. In fact, researchers have been intrigued by the importance of spirituality in people’s lives for decades, which is why they have focused on studying What happens in the human brain when people feel deeply spiritually connected.

Different ways of understanding spiritual experience

The problem is that the concept of “spirituality” can be understood in many different ways across cultures and individuals.. In this sense, anything that someone might call a “spiritual experience” can stimulate the brain in very complex ways. For this reason, the task of specifying a brain mechanism for spirituality is not simple.

However, despite the lofty objective, researchers have continued to invest efforts in this regard. Among its conclusions stands out the idea that Multiple brain regions are involved in processing experiences of union with a higher being.

Furthermore, another conclusion that we found at the end of different studies states that individuals who participate in long-term spiritual practice have decreased activity in the right parietal lobe (related to self-oriented focus). In other wordsspiritual experiences seemed to increase, so to speak, disinterest in the brain.

Spirituality and depression

Lisa Miller, editor of the Manual of Psychology and Spirituality from Oxford University Press, has carried out a series of studies on what happens in the brains of people with intense spiritual lives. Her research has revealed that these people show cortical thickening in the prefrontal cortex.

Interestingly, Miller says that People living with chronic depression experience cortical thinning in the same region of the brain. This gave rise to a hypothesis: spirituality and depression are probably two sides of the same coin.

Miller and a team of researchers from the Spirituality Mind Body Institute used the fMRI to find out what happens in people’s brains when they imagine an intense spiritual experience.

They recruited people willing to participate in different spiritual and religious practices. In a first experiment, they asked them to They remembered a personal spiritual experience while their brains were scanned. Scripts with instructions were used to describe a situation in which they felt a strong connection to a higher power or spiritual presence.

Since they all had very different spiritual practices, The experiences described in the experiment guide covered a wide range of variabilityfrom “a two-way relationship with a higher power” and “a felt sense of oneness in nature by the ocean or on a mountaintop” to “being in an area of ​​intense physical activity (such as sports or yoga, sudden awareness , connectivity or buoyancy felt bodily, meditation or prayer.”

The researchers argue that This relates to a broader, modern definition of spirituality that can be independent of religiosity. Their findings have been published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Spirituality and stress

Studying the brain activity of volunteers when imagining a personal spiritual experience allowed scientists identify brain regions that seemed to be involved in the processing of spiritual events.

Miller and his colleagues also compared brain activity seen when participants described a spiritual experience with brain activity seen while volunteers imagined stressful or neutral experiences that did not trigger strong emotions.

By doing so, they were able to find a pattern that they say is only seen when it comes to a spiritual experience. Thus, they discovered that The inferior parietal lobe, linked to awareness of oneself and others, reduced its activity when participants described a spiritual event, while activity in that brain region increased when they thought it was stressful or emotionally neutral.

Therefore, the team suggests that this region may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences. This seems to support the idea that spiritual experiences could help buffer the effects of stress on mental health.

In this sense, These results point to different neural mechanisms underlying spiritual experience.. Furthermore, the researchers say that explaining how spiritual experiences are mediated by the brain, by extending similar studies to clinical populations, could make it easier to some spiritual practices could help within the framework of certain mental health interventions.

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