Here we look at the individual, spiritual aspect of religion. Below are links to empirical studies pertaining to different categories that broadly address issues tied to individual spirituality.
Meditation
Author(s): Britta K. Hölzel, Ulrich Ott, Tim Gard, Hannes Hempel, Martin Weygandt, Katrin Morgen and Dieter Vaitl
Source: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on December 3, 2007. Volume 3, Number 1. Pp. 55-61
Abstract: Mindfulness meditators practice the non-judgmental observation of the ongoing stream of internal experiences as they arise. Using voxel-based morphometry, this study investigated MRI brain images of 20 mindfulness (Vipassana) meditators (mean practice 8.6 years; 2 h daily) and compared the regional gray matter concentration to that of non-meditators matched for sex, age, education and handedness. Meditators were predicted to show greater gray matter concentration in regions that are typically activated during meditation. Results confirmed greater gray matter concentration for meditators in the right anterior insula, which is involved in interoceptive awareness. This group difference presumably reflects the training of bodily awareness during mindfulness meditation. Furthermore, meditators had greater gray matter concentration in the left inferior temporal gyrus and right hippocampus. Both regions have previously been found to be involved in meditation. The mean value of gray matter concentration in the left inferior temporal gyrus was predictable by the amount of meditation training, corroborating the assumption of a causal impact of meditation training on gray matter concentration in this region. Results suggest that meditation practice is associated with structural differences in regions that are typically activated during meditation and in regions that are relevant for the task of meditation.
Author(s): J A Brefczynski-Lewis, A Lutz, H S Schaefer, D B Levinson, R J Davidson
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Washington: Jul 3, 2007. Vol. 104, Iss. 27; pg. 11483
Abstract: Meditation refers to a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. One of the most basic forms of meditation is concentration meditation, in which sustained attention is focused on an object such as a small visual stimulus or the breath. In age-matched participants, using functional MRI, we found that activation in a network of brain regions typically involved in sustained attention showed an inverted u-shaped curve in which expert meditators (EMs) with an average of 19,000 h of practice had more activation than novices, but EMs with an average of 44,000 h had less activation. In response to distracter sounds used to probe the meditation, EMs vs. novices had less brain activation in regions related to discursive thoughts and emotions and more activation in regions related to response inhibition and attention. Correlation with hours of practice suggests possible plasticity in these mechanisms.
Author(s): Antoine Lutz, Lawrence L Greischar, Nancy B Rawlings, Matthieu Ricard, Richard J Davidson
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Washington: Nov 16, 2004. Vol. 101, Iss. 46; pg. 16369
Abstract: Practitioners understand “meditation,” or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one’s own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the postmeditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.
Author(s): Andrew Newberg, Abass Alavi, Michael Baime, Michael Pourdehnad, Jill Santanna and Eugene d’Aquili
Source: Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Volume 106, Issue 2, 10 April 2001, Pages 113-122
Abstract: This study measured changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during the complex cognitive task of meditation using single photon emission computed tomography. Eight experienced Tibetan Buddhist meditators were injected at baseline with 7 mCi HMPAO and scanned 20 min later for 45 min. The subjects then meditated for 1 h at which time they were injected with 25 mCi HMPAO and scanned 20 min later for 30 min. Values were obtained for regions of interest in major brain structures and normalized to whole brain activity. The percentage change between meditation and baseline was compared. Correlations between structures were also determined. Significantly increased rCBF (P<0.05) was observed in the cingulate gyrus, inferior and orbital frontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and thalamus. The change in rCBF in the left DLPFC correlated negatively (P<0.05) with that in the left superior parietal lobe. Increased frontal rCBF may reflect focused concentration and thalamic increases overall increased cortical activity during meditation. The correlation between the DLPFC and the superior parietal lobe may reflect an altered sense of space experienced during meditation. These results suggest a complex rCBF pattern during the task of meditation.
Induced Experiences
Author(s): R. R. Griffiths, W. A. Richards, U. McCann, R. Jesse
Source: Psychopharmacology. New York: Aug 2006. Vol. 187, Iss. 3; pg. 268
Abstract:
Rationale: Although psilocybin has been used for centuries for religious purposes, little is known scientifically about its acute and persisting effects.
Objectives: This double-blind study evaluated the acute and longer-term psychological effects of a high dose of psilocybin relative to a comparison compound administered under comfortable, supportive conditions.
Materials and methods: The participants were hallucinogennaïve adults reporting regular participation in religious or spiritual activities. Two or three sessions were conducted at 2-month intervals. Thirty volunteers received orally administered psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) and methylphenidate hydrochloride (40 mg/70 kg) in counterbalanced order. To obscure the study design, six additional volunteers received methylphenidate in the first two sessions and unblended psilocybin in a third session. The 8-h sessions were conducted individually. Volunteers were encouraged to close their eyes and direct their attention inward. Study monitors rated volunteers’ behavior during sessions. Volunteers completed questionnaires assessing drug effects and mystical experience immediately after and 2 months after sessions. Community observers rated changes in the volunteer’s attitudes and behavior.
Results: Psilocybin produced a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At 2 months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.
Conclusions: When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences. The ability to occasion such experiences prospectively will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences
Emotion
Author(s): Susan T Fiske.
Source: Daedalus. Boston: Winter 2007. Vol. 136, Iss. 1; pg. 156, 4 pgs
Abstract: In our own lab, for example, we dug up dozens of images of societal groups who were identifiable in an instant: people with disabilities, older people, homeless people, drug addicts, rich businessmen, and American Olympic athletes. Notably, the homeless people’s photographs also failed to activate other areas of the brain that are reliably involved whenever people think about other people or themselves (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex). Other researchers have seen that even dull yearbook photographs of black or white young men can trigger the brain’s amygdala; these emotion-alert areas activate in many whites to pictures of unfamiliar black male faces, as if they are prepared for fear in particular.
Author(s): Ross A Hammond, Robert Axelrod.
Source: The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Beverly Hills: Dec 2006. Vol. 50, Iss. 6; pg. 926, 11 pgs
Abstract: Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of attitudes and behaviors, typically including in-group favoritism. Empirical evidence suggests that a predisposition to favor in-groups can be easily triggered by even arbitrary group distinctions and that preferential cooperation within groups occurs even when it is individually costly. The authors study the emergence and robustness of ethnocentric behaviors of in-group favoritism, using an agent-based evolutionary model. They show that such behaviors can become widespread under a broad range of conditions and can support very high levels of cooperation, even in one-move prisoner’s dilemma games. When cooperation is especially costly to individuals, the authors show how ethnocentrism itself can be necessary to sustain cooperation.
Author(s): James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer, Richard J. Davidson
Source: Psychological Science. New York: Dec 2006. Vol. 17, Iss. 12; pg. 1032
Abstract: Social contact promotes enhanced health and well-being, likely as a function of the social regulation of emotional responding in the face of various life stressors. For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 16 married women were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their husband’s hand, the hand of an anonymous male experimenter, or no hand at all. Results indicated a pervasive attenuation of activation in the neural systems supporting emotional and behavioral threat responses when the women held their husband’s hand. A more limited attenuation of activation in these systems occurred when they held the hand of a stranger. Most strikingly, the effects of spousal hand-holding on neural threat responses varied as a function of marital quality, with higher marital quality predicting less threat-related neural activation in the right anterior insula, superior frontal gyrus, and hypothalamus during spousal, but not stranger, hand-holding.
Author(s): Richard J Davidson, Jeffrey S Maxwell, Alexander J Shackman
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Washington: Aug 17, 2004. Vol. 101, Iss. 33; pg. 11915
Abstract: The recent report in PNAS by Ishai et al is part of a growing corpus of literature that establishes the privileged status of emotional stimuli for the brain. Stimuli that convey emotion command attention and enjoy enhanced processing in a distributed network of brain regions that represents different features of the stimulus and options for responding to such stimuli.
Author(s): Alumit Ishai, Luiz Pessoa, Philip C Bikle, Leslie G Ungerleider
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Washington: Jun 29, 2004. Vol. 101, Iss. 26; pg. 9827
Abstract: Single-unit recordings and functional brain imaging studies have shown reduced neural responses to repeated stimuli in the visual cortex. By using event-related functional MRI, we compared the activation evoked by repetitions of neutral and fearful faces, which were either task relevant (targets) or irrelevant (distracters). We found that within the inferior occipital gyri, lateral fusiform gyri, superior temporal sulci, amygdala, and the inferior frontal gyri/insula, targets evoked stronger responses than distracters and their repetition was associated with significantly reduced responses. Repetition suppression, as manifested by the difference in response amplitude between the first and third repetitions of a target, was stronger for fearful than neutral faces. Distracter faces, regardless of their repetition or valence, evoked negligible activation, indicating top-down attenuation of behaviorally irrelevant stimuli. Our findings demonstrate a three-way interaction between emotional valence, repetition, and task relevance and suggest that repetition suppression is influenced by high-level cognitive processes in the human brain.
Neural Illusions
Author(s): Dirk De Ridder, Koen Van Laere, Patrick Dupont, Tomas Menovsky, Paul Van De Heyning
Source: The New England Journal of Medicine. Boston: Nov 1, 2007. Vol. 357, Iss. 18; pg. 1829
Abstract: An out-of-body experience was repeatedly elicited during stimulation of the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus on the right side in a patient in whom electrodes had been implanted to suppress tinnitus. Positron-emission tomographic scanning showed brain activation at the temporoparietal junction–more specifically, at the angular-supramarginal gyrus junction and the superior temporal gyrus-sulcus on the right side. Activation was also noted at the right precuneus and posterior thalamus, extending into the superior vermis. We suggest that activation of these regions is the neural correlate of the disembodiment that is part of the out-of-body experience.
Author(s): H. Henrik Ehrsson
Source: Science. Washington: Aug 24, 2007. Vol. 317, Iss. 5841; pg. 1048
Abstract: I report an illusion in which individuals experience that they are located outside their physical bodies and looking at their bodies from this perspective. This demonstrates that the experience of being localized within the physical body can be determined by the visual perspective in conjunction with correlated multisensory information from the body.
Summary from WebMD:
Aug. 23, 2007 — Ever had an out-of-body experience, where you were wide awake and “saw” your body as if you were a bystander? Scientists may have figured out how out-of-body experiences happen. Turns out, it’s all about the eyes. Two new studies — both published in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Science — put a state-of-the-art spin on out-of-body research.
In one experiment, 14 healthy, young adults wore virtual-reality goggles as they stood in the researchers’ lab. A few feet behind them, a video camera filmed their backs and projected that image, in real time, into a hologram a few feet in front of the participants. The researchers stroked the participants’ real and virtual back at the same time. Afterward, they only stroked the participants’ virtual back — but even so, participants said they had the sensation that their real backs were being touched. Participants didn’t lose all sense of themselves. They didn’t report feeling like they had left their bodies. But they did describe the sensation as weird or strange, according to Olaf Blanke, MD, PhD, and colleagues. Blanke directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Blanke’s team did similar tests on 14 other participants to confirm the findings.
The other study also used virtual reality and video cameras to simulate out-of-body experiences. But neuroscientist H. Henrik Ehrsson, MD, PhD, pushed the envelope a little farther. Ehrsson works at University College London and the Karolinksa Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In a series of experiments, Ehrsson found that participants “felt” touch applied to virtual-reality versions of their bodies. What’s more, when Ehrsson pretended to strike participants’ virtual bodies — not their true selves — with a hammer, participants were scared for their actual flesh and blood, though they had been promised that they weren’t in any danger whatsoever. “This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience,” Ehrsson says in a news release. “In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are.
Author(s): Shahar Arzy, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, Laurent Spinelli, Olaf Blanke
Source: Nature. 443.7109 (2006): 287.
Abstract: Stimulation of a site on the brain’s left hemisphere prompts the creepy feeling that somebody is close by. The strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present has been described by psychiatric and neurological patients, as well as by healthy subjects, but it is not understood how the illusion is triggered by the brain. Here we describe the repeated induction of this sensation in a patient who was undergoing presurgical evaluation for epilepsy treatment, as a result of focal electrical stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction: the illusory person closely ‘shadowed’ changes in the patient’s body position and posture. These perceptions may have been due to a disturbance in the multisensory processing of body and self at the temporoparietal junction.
Author(s): Olaf Blanke; Theodor Landis; Laurent Spinelli; Margitta Seeck
Source: Brain. Feb 2004. 127, 2; ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source pg. 243
Abstract: During an out-of-body experience (OBE), the experient seems to be awake and to see his body and the world from a location outside the physical body. A closely related experience is autoscopy (AS), which is characterized by the experience of seeing one’s body in extrapersonal space. Yet, despite great public interest and many case studies, systematic neurological studies of OBE and AS are extremely rare and, to date, no testable neuroscientific theory exists. The present study describes phenomenological, neuropsychological and neuroimaging correlates of OBE and AS in six neurological patients. We provide neurological evidence that both experiences share important central mechanisms. We show that OBE and AS are frequently associated with pathological sensations of position, movement and perceived completeness of one’s own body. These include vestibular sensations (such as floating, flying, elevation and rotation), visual body-part illusions (such as the illusory shortening, transformation or movement of an extremity) and the experience of seeing one’s body only partially during an OBE or AS. We also find that the patient’s body position prior to the experience influences OBE and AS. Finally, in five patients, brain damage or brain dysfunction is localized to the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). These results suggest that the complex experiences of OBE and AS represent paroxysmal disorders of body perception and cognition (or body schema). The processes of body perception and cognition, and the unconscious creation of central representation(s) of one’s own body based on proprioceptive, tactile, visual and vestibular information–as well as their integration with sensory information of extrapersonal space–is a prerequisite for rapid and effective action with our surroundings. Based on our findings, we speculate that ambiguous input from these different sensory systems is an important mechanism of OBE and AS, and thus the intriguing experience of seeing one’s body in a position that does not coincide with its felt position. We suggest that OBE and AS are related to a failure to integrate proprioceptive, tactile and visual information with respect to one’s own body (disintegration in personal space) and by a vestibular dysfunction leading to an additional disintegration between personal (vestibular) space and extrapersonal (visual) space. We argue that both disintegrations (personal; personal-extrapersonal) are necessary for the occurrence of OBE and AS, and that they are due to a paroxysmal cerebral dysfunction of the TPJ in a state of partially and briefly impaired consciousness.
Project coordinated by Dr. Suchismita Sen of the Pennsylvania State University Religious Studies Department.