{"id":603,"date":"2013-04-22T22:38:43","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T02:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/scienceonreligion\/?p=603"},"modified":"2013-04-22T22:38:43","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T02:38:43","slug":"how-the-brain-escapes-the-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/scienceonreligion\/2013\/04\/how-the-brain-escapes-the-self\/","title":{"rendered":"How the brain escapes the self"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Connor Wood<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Religious experiences get described in a lot of ways. People gushingly talk about a profound sense of oneness, about incredible bliss, joy, and ineffable meaning. One thing you almost never hear, however, is that a religious experience made someone more greedy and selfish. No one ever says, \u201cHey, you know what? I just experienced ultimate spiritual bliss, and boy, did it ever make me focus neurotically on my own struggles, financial problems, and dating insecurities!\u201d Why this incompatibility between spirituality and self-absorption? A team of researchers from the University of Missouri thinks that\u00a0the reason might be found in the brain<\/a>, where reduced function in the region associated with self-awareness is correlated with greater spirituality.<\/p>\n

The team, led by Brick Johnstone and Angela Bodling of the University of Missouri\u2019s Department of Health Psychology, was familiar with previous research showing that suppression of the right parietal cortex appeared to inspire religious experiences. The right parietal cortex (or right parietal lobe) is a part of the brain found near the rear and top of your skull. It\u2019s responsible for orienting the body in space and time, largely by keeping tabs on spatial and temporal relationships with nearby reference points. Neuroscientists such as Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania have previously found that long-term meditators and religious experts have reduced function in the parietal lobe during meditation or other religious exercise, leading many scholars to suspect that meditation dampens one\u2019s sense of a separate self by reducing the ability of the brain to locate the body in relation to the surrounding world.<\/p>\n

But much of this previous research was exploratory rather than hypothesis-driven in nature. What\u2019s more, nearly all previous studies suffered from unsophisticated, one-dimensional measurements of spirituality or religiousness. Johnstone, Bodling, and their colleagues aimed to correct these shortcomings by articulating concrete, theory-driven hypotheses at the outset of their study, and by utilizing several different measures of spirituality. These measures assumed that spirituality is a multidimensional construct \u2013 that is, just as a person might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal, someone could measure as high in one form of spirituality, such as a sense of meaning in life, but low in another, such as frequency of private prayer. This more responsive and multifaceted way of thinking about spirituality promised to deliver a more intricate picture of the relationship between brain functioning and spiritual experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The researchers asked 20 different traumatic brain injury patients to perform a series of cognitive functioning tests that tell clinicians which regions of the brain are not functioning properly. For instance, a test of right parietal functioning asks subjects to match the relative angles of a series of lines (see the figure at right). Patients with high-functioning right parietal cortices can accurately indicate which angles match with the lines, but those with damaged parietal lobes have difficulties assessing spatial relationships and perform poorly on the task.<\/p>\n

Unlike many neuroscientists who study religious experience, then, the University of Missouri researchers relied on clinical and behavioral data rather than direct brain imaging. This was intentional \u2013 while MRIs and CAT scans can tell you which parts of the brain are active at which times, tests that measure cognitive abilities can give a more reliable picture of the brain\u2019s actual functioning. This behavioral data reduces uncertainty when it comes to pinning specific spiritual phenomena to underlying neural processes.<\/p>\n

The researchers hypothesized that brain-injury patients who performed poorly on the tests of right parietal functioning would also report higher levels of different types of spirituality. They also predicted that strong performance on tests of frontal lobe functioning, which require subjects to trace a series of numbers and letters in a maze-like patterns, would be positively associated with spirituality. Tasks that tested functioning in other areas of the brain, such as the right and left temporal lobes, were not expected to be associated with spirituality one way or the other.<\/p>\n

While the subject pool was small, the results more than supported the researchers\u2019 hypotheses. Poor performance on right-parietal tasks was positively and significantly associated with spirituality as defined by the 5-dimensional \u201cInspirit\u201d measure of spirituality, while strong frontal cortex functioning positively predicted private religious practice, such as personal prayer or meditation. Tests of brain function in other lobes didn\u2019t predict spirituality at all.<\/p>\n

However, while attenuated right parietal function did predict increased spirituality, it only achieved statistical significance for one of the Inspirit measure\u2019s five dimensions of spirituality: forgiveness. The statistically significant negative correlation between the Inspirit as a whole and right parietal function depended largely on this single dimension of spirituality. In other words, people whose right parietal lobes didn\u2019t work very well \u2013 most likely due to serious injury or illness \u2013 seemed to have a much easier time forgiving others than average people did.<\/p>\n

Of course, one might question whether \u201cforgiveness\u201d really qualifies as a dimension of spirituality. After all, plenty of people who do not consider themselves \u201cspiritual\u201d or religious in any way forgive others around them on a daily basis. (Think about it: if this weren\u2019t true, no atheists would ever be able to maintain marriages or have kids!) So does this research merely show that reduced right parietal functioning makes it easier to forgive others, without telling us anything about spirituality? Maybe not. Three other dimensions of spirituality \u2013 daily spiritual experiences, spiritual values and beliefs, and spiritual coping \u2013 were also negatively correlated with right parietal function. These relationships didn\u2019t quite attain statistical significance, but together they contributed to the strong negative correlation between parietal function and spirituality. It\u2019s likely that, in a larger sample, each of these dimensions of spirituality would attain significance.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, people who performed strongly on the test of frontal cortex functioning were much more likely than average to report regularly partaking in private religious practices. The frontal cortex is associated with what\u2019s called executive cognitive function \u2013 the ability to direct attention, focus one\u2019s awareness, and filter out distractor stimuli in order to concentrate. Thus, participants who prayed often in private \u2013 but not necessarily in public settings such as churches \u2013 appeared to have greater ability to focus on tasks and ignore distractions. This relationship makes it difficult to argue, as some might be tempted to do, that spirituality is simply the product of an atrophied brain. Counterintuitively, spirituality seems to be associated with enhanced function in some parts of the brain and reduced function in others.<\/p>\n

This study is noteworthy because its authors made and corroborated specific hypotheses linking brain function to spirituality. The implications are clear: a reduced ability to orient one\u2019s body in spatial and temporal relationships appears to be associated with greater spirituality \u2013 particularly, in this study, the ability to forgive others. The fact that all the measures of spirituality in this study were self-reports notwithstanding, these results are compelling because they\u2019re theory-driven. If you have a data-based idea of how something works, and you come up with a concrete hypothesis based on that idea, even tenuous test results that match your hypothesis tend to support your underlying idea. The body is where our selves, our egos, are located. A brain that can\u2019t tell where the body is in space and time apparently can\u2019t produce a very robust sense of self \u2013 opening the gates to a kind of transcendence.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research from the University of Missouri shows that reduced functioning in the right parietal cortex is associated with high levels of spirituality \u2013 particularly forgiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[808,809,801],"tags":[58,993,995,994,362,26,267,992,6],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-and-perception","category-science-and-religion-2","category-scientific-study-of-religion-2","tag-brain","tag-cortex","tag-neural","tag-neuroscientists","tag-psychology","tag-religious","tag-right-parietal-lobe","tag-self-awareness","tag-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\nHow the brain escapes the self<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Research from the University of Missouri shows that reduced functioning in the right parietal cortex is associated 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