God and Your Brain

Q: What do sex, gambling, drugs and God have in common?

A: We're not sure yet, but we're close.

The “we” in this case are the researchers who call themselves the Religious Brain Project. Based out of the University of Utah, their mission is to figure out how the brain operates in people with deep spiritual and religious beliefs. Specifically, they want to know which neural pathways are involved in the transmission of spiritual feelings. Their preliminary work seems to indicate they are the same brain reward circuits traversed by love, sex, gambling, drugs and music.

The scientists employed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to make their determination that “feeling the Spirit” was the neurological kin of drawing to an inside straight. During fMRI scans, 19 young-adult church members, all former missionaries and self-described devout Mormons, performed four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. The hour-long exam included six minutes of rest; six minutes of audiovisual control (a video detailing their church’s membership statistics); 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 (church-produced video of family and Biblical scenes, and other religiously evocative content); and another eight minutes of quotations. At each juncture, the participants were quizzed whether they were “feeling the spirit.” The subjects responded with answers ranging from “not feeling” to “very strongly 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,” says lead author Michael Ferguson, who carried out the study as a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Utah.

The scans backed up the acclimations. The scientists found that powerful spiritual feelings were reproducibly associated with activation in the nucleus accumbens. This is a key area of the brain set up for processing reward. Peak activity in the region occurred about 1 to 3 seconds before test subjects flagged it. As participants were experiencing peak feelings, their hearts beat faster and their breathing deepened.

“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.

At this stage the scientists will not make any claims for believers in any other religion besides Mormonism. They point out that previous research in the field suggests that the brain responds quite differently to meditative and contemplative practices often found in many eastern religions.

The study has been published in Social Neuroscience.