Our brain and spirituality

How is it that in all places and at all times, every human community had or is having a spiritual/religious practice? From the smallest and most isolated communities in the heart of the Amazon or in the middle of the desert, to the largest urban agglomerations of a country like India, every group of people has sensed that there is something beyond the material, beyond what can be touched and seen, that there is a sacred space, a universal order and a set of moral principles that should govern our existence.

Can we think that man has a universal spiritual dimension beyond the place and time in which he was born? That there are parts of our brain that are responsible for spiritual activity, just as there are parts responsible for motor skills, speech or memory?

Some 80 years ago, Carl Jung was talking about the central place that spirituality occupies in the human psyche. Many contested it, considering it too esoteric for a measurable, scientific field, such as psychology or psychiatry. But just a few decades later, modern neuroscience made it possible, through magnetic resonance technologies, to study the human brain in detail, including in terms of spiritual activity.

Lisa Miller, an American researcher and clinical psychologist concerned with the effect of religious and spiritual practices on human resilience, shows, through her own research and the results of other researchers’ studies, that regardless of the religious/spiritual practice she follows, the human brain is activated in the same areas and in the same ways. The activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) is reduced, which means that our attention is rather directed outwards, towards the world and is extracted from the rumination process, self-referential, in other words from the Ego.

The ventral attention network increases in activity, the one that processes information beyond our conscious, perceptual field, the network through which we have awareness, insights.The temporal frontal network is activated, it is the network involved in processing the representation of others and the connection between them, which is also activated when we are held in the arms of our mother or our romantic partner. It is the neural activity that allows us to feel the loving embrace of others and of the world itself.There is an increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex and reduced activity in the inferior parietal lobe, where the distinction between oneself and others is made. Thus, the feeling of separation dawns and there is an exit from the Ego and the person experiences feelings of transcendence and union. It is the area where we know we belong and that we are never alone.Amazingly, regardless of whether we pray to Jesus or the Virgin Mary, whether we read verses from the Koran or Buddhist sutras, whether we meditate, worship or participate in shamanic rituals, our brain activates more or less in the same way. We withdraw our attention from our egocentric preoccupations, we become able to perceive elements beyond our usual perceptual field, we feel connected and experience feelings of transcendence and union with others and with everything.For more details and conclusions of other scientific studies, I highly recommend Lisa Miller’s book, “The Awaked Brain. The psychology of spirituality” (2021). Penguin Publishing