Author: Miller L1, Balodis IM2,3, McClintock CH1, Xu J2, Lacadie CM4, Sinha R2,5,6, Potenza MN1,5,6,7
Affiliation: <sup>1</sup>Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
<sup>2</sup>Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
<sup>3</sup>Peter Boris Centre for Addictions Research, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 3K7, Canada.
<sup>4</sup>Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
<sup>5</sup>Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
<sup>6</sup>Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
<sup>7</sup>Connecticut Mental Health Center, New Haven, CT 06519, USA.
Conference/Journal: Cereb Cortex.
Date published: 2018 May 29
Other:
Special Notes: doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy102. [Epub ahead of print] , Word Count: 165
Across cultures and throughout history, human beings have reported a variety of spiritual experiences and the concomitant perceived sense of union that transcends one's ordinary sense of self. Nevertheless, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of spiritual experiences, particularly when examined across different traditions and practices. By adapting an individualized guided-imagery task, we investigated neural correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences as compared with stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. We observed in the spiritual condition, as compared with the neutral-relaxing condition, reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), a result that suggests the IPL may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences. Compared with stress cues, responses to spiritual cues showed reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing. Overall, the study introduces a novel method for investigating brain correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences and suggests neural mechanisms associated with broadly defined and personally experienced spirituality.
PMID: 29846531 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhy102