Is there a spiritual center in the brain, a module of neural circuits specifically designed for religious experience?
Despite popular reports, scientists have not yet found a “God spot.” But brain scans of people praying or meditating are teaching researchers that different spiritual practices do share common neural features, says Nina P. Azari, an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
Ms. Azari is something of an anomaly among brain researchers. She first earned a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience — and then earned another one in religious studies. Armed with that training, she has been conducting experiments to see what the tools of neuroscience can teach about religious experience.
In one study, performed in Germany, Ms. Azari scanned nonreligious college students as well as members of the Free Evangelical Fundamentalist Community, who interpret the Bible literally. She measured their brain activity while they read a prayer, a nursery rhyme, and instructions in a phone book.
For both groups of subjects, reading the rhymes fired up their limbic system, the part of the brain associated with emotional arousal. But that system did not respond for the religious subjects when they were praying.
Instead, the church members showed more activity in the prefrontal regions of their brain near the front of the skull and in the rear of their parietal lobes, located on the sides of the brain, than in the rest of their brains. Other studies have found the prefrontal cortex involved when people are thinking about social relationships and the mental states of other people.
To some degree, Ms. Azari’s findings overlap with a scanning study of Buddhist meditators conducted by Andrew B. Newberg, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Newberg says the limbic system had been touted “as the God spot of the brain,” so it is interesting that the scanning data suggest other areas are more relevant to religious experiences.
While emotions may well play a role, says Ms. Azari, the data suggest that perceptions of relations are critical during spiritual activities. “What I think is the heart of it is the dynamics of the relationality,” she says. “It’s not about you or God; rather, it’s the dynamic you experience between yourself and the Other, whether it’s between you and God, or with the rest of the world or the universe.”
She is running a new study across various types of religious practices. Although she recognizes that there are important differences, she hopes that the findings about relationality will persist: “Then we have neuroscientific support that there is something common across traditions.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A17