This article was originally published in Tonic*
Could feeling the glory of God be compared to any earthly pleasure? It seems so. A new study from the University of Utah, United States, shows that the human brain processes spiritual and religious satisfaction in a similar way to other pleasurable experiences, including sexual activity and drug use.
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Spiritual satisfaction provides a neural dopamine “hit” like other more mundane pleasures, says Michael Ferguson, a postdoctoral associate working in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. However, there is a significant difference between the two: achieving gratification in the brain from religion requires a “higher mind,” more abstract thinking about concepts such as personality and morality. Meanwhile, substances “like sugar or cocaine…what they do is hijack the brain’s reward complex,” Ferguson explains. He hopes that his studies in neurology with the Church of Latter Day Saints help to better understand the complex relationship between society, religion and psychology.
The study subjected 19 young people from the Mormon Church (twelve men and seven women) to a series of tests designed to invoke feelings of spirituality. This included activities such as prayer, Bible readings, and audio and video stimuli related to the Mormon Church.
The participants’ brains were measured using an fMRI machine. They then handed out a questionnaire to assess their feelings, specifically, whether they were “feeling the Spirit.”
The researchers showed that when participants were “feeling the Spirit,” certain areas of the brain lit up with activity, including the ventral striatum (reward center) and the nucleus accumben, an area whose activity has been associated with romantic love and is “a common pathway to the chemically altered euphoric states associated with drugs of abuse, including cocaine and methamphetamines,” says Ferguson.
What do these spiritual impulses really produce? Ferguson says the most effective stimuli for “feeling the Spirit” were images of Jesus, families, and religious leaders. He points out that in the scriptures there is a passage of Book of Mormon is particularly evocative:
“Therefore men are free according to the flesh, and all things are given to men, and they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and dead”.
You feel better now, don’t you?
