Study: Turns out religion is kinda like an opiate

Researchers with the Religious Brain Project set out to find the brain networks involved when religious study participants were led to “feel the Spirit.” And, they found some. Check out the rest of this image and details on the study “Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons.” less Researchers with the Religious Brain Project set out to find the brain networks involved when religious study participants were led to “feel the Spirit.” And, they found some. Check out the rest of this ... more Image 1 of / 69 Caption Close Study: Turns out religion is kinda like an opiate 1 / 69 Back to Gallery

If you have a religious experience, isn't it bound to happen somewhere in the brain?

But if it is, what does that say about the substance of the experience? Is spirituality a thing outside of ourselves that can cause a physical reaction, like electricity or a blow to the head?

Is it all an internal but not physical experience, something to do with the soul?

Or does a middleman in some part of our brain experience the ineffable ineffably and then push a serious of buttons on a control board to light up the brain and give us feelings?

Or are our brains making the whole thing up?

Humans mostly just make up their minds about religious experiences theologically or philosophically and leave it at that. But since religion is such a big deal across the planet, perhaps we should at least look to see what we can see, instead of declaring it off limits to scientific exploration.

Well that's pretty much exactly what's behind the Religious Brain Project at the University of Utah School of Medicine. The project aims to use the tools of science to see if maybe there isn't something physical going on in the brain when we have religious experiences.

In the first neurological study to come out of the group's effort, the researchers write:

"... religious experience uniquely contributes to establishment of social systems with far-reaching con- sequences for pro- and antisocial behaviors ... Despite the reported impact of religious experience in the lives of more than 5.8 billion religiously affiliated individuals worldwide ... even basic questions about brain networks engaged by religious experience remain unclear."

The brain on God study

The group talked 19 young-adult, devout members of the Mormon church into being slid into an MRI machine. Inside, they were exposed to religious doctrine and other church-related speeches, video and images.

In short, their brains lit up pretty much the same as brains that are exposed to "love, sex, gambling, drugs and music." They ran the experiments several times and got the same results, as stated in the study:

We demonstrated in a group of devout Mormons that religious experience, identified as "feeling the Spirit," was associated with consistent brain activation across individuals within bilateral nucleus accumbens, frontal attentional, and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci. Brain regions associated with representation of reward were reproducibly activated in four distinct acquisitions using three experimental paradigms, with activation immediately preceding peak spiritual feelings identified by the participants ...

The researchers added that the way the brain reacted suggested "a mechanism whereby doctrinal concepts may come to be intrinsically rewarding and motivate behavior in religious individuals."

So, it looks like something is going on in the brain related to religious experiences. This isn't the first study to look for interaction between brain matter and religion, but as the tools for seeing what's going on in the brain get better the results become more telling.

"In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia," senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson said in a news release.

He added in an email exchange that the study "Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons" was the group's first published study, "and we have another 2 papers going out for peer review in the next month or so.

"We are excited to continue new studies looking at the effect of religion on the brain and how brain circuits affect religious behavior."

So, stay tuned.

Jake Ellison can be reached at jakeellisonjournalism@gmail.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook. If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.