at The beginning everything is calm, but little by little they activate the centers that govern pleasure and reward such as the nucleus accumbens. The image is that of a brain that is experiencing religious fervor, and not much different from what it feels like with the drugs, the sex, or the music.
A team of researchers of medicine of the University of Utah were proposed to quantify the effects of religious experience on the brain. For their experiment, they recruited a group of 19 mormons devotees of less than 20 years and underwent magnetic resonance imaging, in an environment that favored positively the religious sentiment through videos, readings and quotes religious.
When the volunteers claimed to feel at peace and close to God, their brains lit according to patterns that neurologists compared with other pleasurable experiences such as love, the sex, the drugs, the music or the game.
The duration of these stimuli reached peaks of 1 to three seconds, but the nucleus accumbens is not the only region that registered a high activity. Accompanying the prefrontal cortex means, associated with the moral judgment and valuation, and regions related to attention and concentration.
The study is part of the project The Religious Brain, which tries to understand what physiological effects has the religious experience in western countries. Until now had only been studied at the neurological level practices of eastern origin such as meditation. This project is the first that examines the religion in the western world from a medical point of view.
"we’re Just beginning to understand how the brain works during experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine, or transcendent." explains the neuroradiólogo and main author of the project Jeff Anderson. the "The religious experience influenced powerfully at how many people take decisions that affect us all. To understand what happens in the brain when we make these decisions is really important." [via Medical Express]
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