Brain Could Affect Religious Response, Researchers Report

NEW ORLEANS — Seeking a glimpse of the neural machinery of the soul, scientists have discovered that the brain may be naturally attuned to words of prayer and religious experience.

In what researchers called the first serious experiment aimed at the neural basis of religion, scientists at the UC San Diego brain and perception laboratory this week said they found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly someone responds to a mystical experience. As evidence of how brain cells and synapses might process spiritual stirrings, the experiment suggests a physical basis for a religious state of mind.

Certainly, no one can capture the intangible substance of meditation or religious rapture for direct laboratory analysis. The researchers instead sought insight into the spiritual side of the brain by investigating a group of patients suffering from an unusual form of epilepsy that involves the brain’s temporal lobe, which the scientists dubbed the “God Module.”

People suffering this type of seizure have long reported intense mystical and religious experiences as part of their attacks and are unusually preoccupied with mystical thoughts between seizures. That led the team to use these patients to investigate the relationship between the physical structure of the brain and religious experiences.

In a carefully designed experiment, the researchers determined that one effect of the patients’ seizures was to strengthen their brain’s involuntary response to religious words, leading the scientists to suggest that a portion of the brain is naturally attuned to ideas about a supreme being.

“It is not clear why such dedicated neural machinery . . . for religion may have evolved,” the team reported Tuesday at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. One possibility, the scientists suggested, was to encourage tribe loyalty or reinforce kinship ties or the stability of a closely knit clan.

They emphasized that their findings do not suggest that religion is simply a matter of brain chemistry. “These studies do not in any way negate the validity of religious experience or God,” the team said.

“They merely provide an explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved.”

Until recently, most neuroscientists confined their inquiries to research aimed at alleviating the medical problems that affect the brain’s health, and to attempts to fathom its fundamental neural mechanisms. Emboldened by their growing understanding of how the brain works, however, scientists now dare to investigate the relationship involving the brain, human consciousness and a range of intangible mental experiences.

Craig Kinsely, an expert in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Richmond, called the study “intriguing” and said “the implications are fascinating.”

“People have been tickling around the edges of consciousness, and this sort of research plunges in,” Kinsely said. “There is the quandary of whether the mind created God or God created the mind. This is going to shake people up, but [any conclusion] is very premature.”

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, the senior scientist involved in the experiment and director of the center for brain and cognition at UC San Diego, said, “We are skating on thin ice. We are only starting to look at this. The exciting thing is that you can even begin to contemplate scientific experiments on the neural basis of religion and God.”

To open a window into how the brain processes spiritual experiences, the UC San Diego researchers studied three patients, all of whom displayed the unusual mystical preoccupations and profound religious feelings of people whose epilepsy affects the temporal lobe.

“These are people who during seizures will say they see God,” Ramachandran said. “They will say that they feel a union with the universe, a sudden sense of enlightenment or that they feel at one with God. And in between seizures, these people are more preoccupied with abstract spiritual matters such as religion.”

The researchers tested the patients’ involuntary responses to a series of test words about sex, violence and religion by measuring the electrical conductivity of their skin, a standard laboratory technique to assess someone’s emotional responses. They compared the patients’ responses to those of a group of more normally religious people and a neutral control group.

They found that the patients had an unusually strong reaction to religious terms like the word “God,” compared to other people tested.

“Why is the increase in response to religious words?” asked Ramachandran. “We like to suggest there may be neural circuits in the temporal lobe that may be part of the machinery of the brain that is involved in mystical experiences and God. Both during the seizures and in between the seizures, there is a heightened activity of these circuits.”