Neural circuits for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain injury

DOI: https : //doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.06.016

Commentary

More than 80 percent of the world's population believes they belong to some religion or are religious, and they also identify as spiritual. However, it is unclear how spirituality and religiosity are related to neuroticism.

Therefore, in this study, we applied lesion network mapping in two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105) to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious beliefs could be mapped to specific human brain circuits.

The results showed that brain lesions associated with self-reported spirituality mapped to brain circuits centered on the "periaqueductal gray matter".

This is consistent with previous reports related to self-reported religiosity and high religiosity, and explains why the locations of lesions causing delusions and alien-rim syndrome also intersect with this circuit. Thus, these findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity are mapped to a common brain circuit centered on the "midbrain periaqueductal gray matter," which previous studies have found to be involved in fear conditioning, pain regulation, and altruistic behavior.