Page 4 - IAV Digital Magazine #415

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U of U Study: Religious Thoughts Trigger Same Reward Systems As Love, Drugs, Music And Sex
Most Americans, about 89%, say they believe in God, and some have felt God’s presence while lis- tening to a sermon or sensed time stand still while they were in deep prayer or meditation.
Now, a new study shows through functional MRI scans that such religious and spiritual experiences can be rewarding to your brain.
They activate the same reward systems between your ears as do feelings of love, being moved by music, using drugs, gambling and sex, according to the study, which waspublished in the journal Social Neuroscience on Tuesday.
“These are areas of the brain that seem like they should be involved in religious and spiritual experience. But yet, reli- gious neuroscience is such a young field — and there are very few studies — and ours was the first study that showed activation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that processes reward,” said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah and lead author of the study.
“Billions of people make important decisions in life based on spiritual and religious feelings and experiences. It’s one of the most powerful influences on our social behavior,” he said. “Yet we know so little about what actually happens in the brain during these
experiences. It’s just a critical question that needs more study.”
For the study, 19 devout young adult members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints had their brains scanned in fMRI machines while they completed various tasks.
The tasks included resting for six minutes, watching a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial reports, read- ing quotations from religious leaders for eight minutes, engag- ing in prayer for six minutes, reading scrip- ture for eight minutes, and watching videos of religious speeches, ren- derings of biblical scenes and church member testimonials.
During the tasks, partici- pants were asked to indicate when they were experiencing spiritual feelings.
As the researchers ana- lyzed the fMRI scans taken of the participants, they took a close look at the degree of spiritual feelings each person reported and then which brain regions were simultaneously activat- ed.
The researchers found that certain brain regions consistently lit up when the participants reported spiritual feelings.
The brain regions includ- ed the nucleus accum- bens, which is associat-
ed with reward; frontal attentional, which is associated with focused attention; and ventrome- dial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, Anderson said.
“I appreciated how they went about trying to ascertain the degree of spiritual experience that a person has. Of course, there is always a subjec- tive component to it, but they seemed to capture it relatively well,” said Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neu- rotheologian and profes- sor of emergency medi- cine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University who was not involved in the study.
He added that the new study further supports previous research that has associated spiritual and religious experi- ences with complex neu-
ral networks.
“It is also interesting to see the changes occur- ring in the frontal atten- tional areas and the nucleus accumbens. These are actually areas we have hypothesized to be involved inreligious practices and experi- ences over 10 years ago,” Newberg said. “It also corroborates our prior studies of various prayer and meditation practices that found changes in the attention- al areas of the brain and also the striatum,” a part of the brain associated with the reward system.
Since the study results were seen only in Mormons, Anderson said, more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or
Muslims.
“I think that it’s still an open question, to what extent there is a com- mon network of brain regions that is active across faith tra- ditions and types of experi- ences. We expect that there are differ- ences,” he said. “In other words, does it feel the same way in the same regions of the brain for a Lutheran woman in Minnesota studying the
Bible as for someone in Syria contemplating reli- giously motivated vio- lence?”
More research is also needed to determine the potential health benefits of such experiences, Anderson said.
The scientific literature on health-related effects of spiritual experiences is growing, said Newberg, who wrote the book “How God Changes Your Brain.”
“Generally, religious and spiritual beliefs and practices reduce depres- sion, stress and anxiety and provide people a sense of meaning and purpose,” he said.
“Additionally, it is also important to understand the potential negative consequences,” he said.
“For example, would this study yield similar or dif- ferent results if the sub- jects were members of ISIS and provided reli- gious quotes and videos supporting those beliefs? That could be a fascinat- ing study.”
Reward systems in the brain might activate dur- ing religious or spiritual experiences in part because they reinforce whatever faith-based beliefs you may have, said Jordan Grafman, director of brain injury research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and a professor at Northwestern University.
“Reinforcing your beliefs makes you feel a little bit better and secure,” said Grafman, who was not involved in the new study.
He added that studying religious beliefs can reveal a lot about the human brain.
“Well, this is one of the things that make us human, right?” Grafman asked.
“There are not too many other species, as far as we know about, that have a religion,” he said. “If you’re simply interest- ed in what distinguishes us as creatures, this is a great example, and that’s why it’s important to study the brain basis, not only of how religion affects the brain, but the brain basis of religious beliefs and how that cor- responds to other kinds of cognitive processes.”
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