Brain surgery boosts spirituality

[Gian_Maria]

Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to
researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to
date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific
brain areas.

To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a
cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues
turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and
after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from
the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients
reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not
the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of
the brain.

“Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and
crank new age people,” says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive
neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. “This is the first
really close-up study on spirituality. We’re dealing with a complex
phenomenon that’s close to the essence of being human.”

The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led
to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the
right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved
in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external
world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their
findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling
detached from the body.

“The most surprising part was the rapidity of the change,” says Urgesi.
“This discovery shows that some complex personality traits are more
malleable than previously thought.”

The science of spirituality

The researchers interviewed 88 people with brain tumours of various
severities. Twenty of these people had benign tumours and although they
underwent surgery no brain tissue was removed. All 88 people
participated in interviews about their religious habits and beliefs
before surgery and afterwards answered a series of true or false
questions that assessed spirituality. The questionnaire tapped into
three main components of self-transcendence: losing yourself in the
moment, feeling connected to other people and nature, and believing in
a higher power. Examples of the items on the questionnaire include: “I
often become so fascinated with what I’m doing that I get lost in the
moment - like I’m detached from time and place” and “I sometimes feel
so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living
organism.”

The researchers then mapped the precise areas of the patients’ brains
where they had lesions as a result of surgery.

Spirituality was tracked to the the left inferior parietal lobe (left)
and the right angular gyrus (right).Urgesi, C. et al. Previous studies
have shown that a broad network of frontal and parietal brain regions
underlies religious beliefs 2,3,4,5. But spirituality does not seem to
involve exactly the same regions of the brain as religion.

In the past, neurologists have observed spiritual changes in patients
with brain damage, but it is not something they systematically
evaluate. “We usually stay away from it, not because it’s not an
important topic, but because it’s very private and personal,” says Rik
Vandenberghe, a neurologist at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg in
Leuven, Belgium. “This paper is very interesting, but like many
pioneering studies, it leaves open many questions.” Vandenberghe, who
uses a similar lesion-mapping technique, says the data should be
interpreted with caution. “It’s very unlikely that something like
self-transcendence is localizable to just two brain areas,” he says.

Coarse measure

Probably the most worrisome aspect of the study is the way the authors
measured self-transcendence. “It’s important to recognize that the
whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a
coarse measure that includes some strange items,” says cognitive
neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In the future, it will be important to understand why lesions in the
parietal cortex induce changes on this scale.”

“Self-transcendence is an abstract concept, and different people will
attribute different meanings to the word,” says Vandenberghe. Patient
self reporting is not always accurate, he says, adding that tapping
into spirituality with more rigorous behavioural measures and
pinpointing the specific thoughts and feelings that constitute it are
the obvious next steps.

In future studies, Urgesi would like to measure other aspects of
spirituality and determine how long changes in spirituality last in
patients. He’d also like to inactivate parietal regions in healthy
subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive
technique that temporarily changes neural activity in a specific
region, to see if he can induce immediate changes in
self-transcendence. He envisions a day when TMS can be used to increase
the feeling of self-transcendence in people with neurological or
psychological disorders.

References
Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S. M., Skrap, M. & Fabbro, F. Neuron 65, 309-319
(2010).
Harris, S. et al. PLoS ONE 4, e0007272 (2009). | Article | PubMed |
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Kapogiannis, D. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 106, 4876-4881 (2009). |
Article | PubMed
Schjoedt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz1, A. W. & Roepstorff, A.
Soc. Cogn Affect. Neurosci. 4, 199-207 (2009). | Article | PubMed
Azari, N. P. et al. Eur. J. Neurosci. 13, 1649-1652 (2001). | Article |
PubMed | ChemPort |

[Gian_Maria]

Commento in italiano dell'UAAR: http://www.uaar.it/news/2010/02/13/a...one-cerebrale/