Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2019 Jun 1;29(6):2331-2338. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy102.
Across cultures and throughout history, human beings have reported a variety of spiritual experiences and the concomitant perceived sense of union that transcends one's ordinary sense of self. Nevertheless, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of spiritual experiences, particularly when examined across different traditions and practices. By adapting an individualized guided-imagery task, we investigated neural correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences as compared with stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. We observed in the spiritual condition, as compared with the neutral-relaxing condition, reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), a result that suggests the IPL may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences. Compared with stress cues, responses to spiritual cues showed reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing. Overall, the study introduces a novel method for investigating brain correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences and suggests neural mechanisms associated with broadly defined and personally experienced spirituality.
跨文化和历史，人类报告了各种各样的精神体验，以及超越个体自我意识的共同感知的融合感。然而，对于精神体验的潜在神经机制，特别是在不同的传统和实践中进行研究时，人们知之甚少。通过采用个体化的引导想象任务，我们研究了与个人有意义的精神体验相关的神经相关性，与压力和中性放松体验进行了比较。与中性放松条件相比，我们观察到在精神条件下，左下顶叶（IPL）的活动减少，这一结果表明 IPL 可能在精神体验期间对感知处理和自我-他人的表现起到重要作用。与压力线索相比，对精神线索的反应显示中脑丘脑和尾状核的活动减少，这些区域与感觉和情绪处理有关。总的来说，这项研究引入了一种新的方法来研究个人有意义的精神体验的大脑相关性，并提出了与广义定义和个人体验的灵性相关的神经机制。
