Spiritual experiences activate same brain reward circuits as love, gambling, music

The University of Utah School of Medicine published a new study of brain images showing that religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits, similar to the way it does with love, sex, gambling, drugs and music.

"We're just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent," said senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson, MD, PhD. "In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia."

The researchers created an environment for devout Mormons to “feel the spirit,” allowing participants to identify the feeling of peace and closeness with God in oneself.

fMRI scans were done on seven women and 12 men, all young-adult church members. Each was asked to perform four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. Participants underwent hour long exams which included six minutes of rest, six minutes of audiovisual control, eight minutes of quotations by Mormon and world religious leaders, eight minutes of reading familiar passages from the Book of Mormon, 12 minutes of audiovisual stimuli and an extra eight minutes of quotations.

Their feelings were measured after each of the exams, as they were asked, “Are you feeling the spirit?” They were given a range to answer from “not feeling” to “very strong feeling.”

"When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded," said lead author Michael Ferguson, PhD, a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Utah.

The results of the fMRI scans showed that their powerful spiritual feelings were associated with activation in the nucleus accumbens. Researchers also found that spiritual feelings were associated with the medial prefrontal cortex and brain regions associated with focused attention.

"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," says Anderson, noting that we don't yet know if believers of other religions would respond the same way. Work by others suggests that the brain responds quite differently to meditative and contemplative practices characteristic of some eastern religions, but so far little is known about the neuroscience of western spiritual practices.