Sure you know or have you heard of people who have lived through some type of “religious experience”. In the majority of cases describe the experience with feelings such as joy, peace and happiness. Now, a new research found that during these experiences, certain centers of the brain’s reward is activated.
in a press release, the School of Medicine of the University of Utah he explained that the religious and spiritual experiences activate the reward circuitry of the brain, in the same way as it does the love, sex, the games, the drugs and the music. The full investigation can be consulted in the journal Social Neuroscience.
“we’re beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret it as spiritual, divine, or transcendental,” said one of the study’s authors, dr. Jeff Anderson.
in Addition explained that the technological advances of recent years, has allowed us to obtain brain imaging more clear that to answer many questions.
In particular, the researchers set out to determine which brain networks are involved in the representation of the spiritual feelings. To do this, they chose as a group to study the mormons. “The identification of this feeling of peace and closeness of God, with oneself is an extremely important part of the life of the mormons,” said the researchers.
For the analysis were chosen 12 young people, seven women and 12 men, to be admitted to mri and find out their response to four different tasks that evoked spiritual feelings. The experiment included a test that lasted one hour and six minutes of rest, six minutes of control audio-visual (a video detailing the statistics of church members), eight minutes of appointments of religious leaders in the world, eight-minute reading of passages relatives of the Book of Mormon 12 minutes of audio-visual stimuli (video produced by the church with family scenes and biblical, and other religious content); and another eight minutes of biblical quotations.
In the assessments, the researchers collected the sentiments of the participants, most of them reported that they experienced feelings of peace and physical sensations of heat.
“During our study, the participants were instructed to think of salvador, to be with their families for eternity, on their heavenly rewards and watched as their brains and bodies responded physically”, explained another of the study’s authors, Michael Ferguson.
On the basis of the explorations of fmri, the researchers found that the powerful spiritual feelings were associated reproducibly with the activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain important for reward of certain prosecutions.
in Addition, the researchers discovered that the spiritual feelings is associated with prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain complex that is activated by tasks that involve the valuation, the judgment, and the moral reasoning, spiritual feelings also activate the brain regions associated with focused attention.
“The religious experience is perhaps the most influential model of how people make decisions that affect us all, for good and for bad. The understanding of what happens in the brain to contribute to those decisions is very important,” Anderson says.
the study is the first initiative of the Religious Brain Project, initiated by a group of researchers from the University of Utah in 2014, whose goal is to understand how the brain works in people with religious and spiritual beliefs run deep.
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