NEUROSPIRITUALITY LAB

Focus Areas

Spiritual Dispositions

The Neurospirituality Lab is currently mapping the neural circuits that support varieties of spiritual dispositions. These spiritual dispositions range along a continuum from dogmatic religiosity to mystical-type spirituality. This work is generating new knowledge about the basic motivational systems that shape human spiritual and religious life. That knowledge will in turn help us better understand both the hidden risks and the positive outcomes stemming from different forms of spirituality.

Spiritual Emotions

The Neurospirituality Lab is actively investigating the neural basis for emotions that people identify as spiritually related or uniquely meaningful. Prime examples include self-transcending emotions such as compassion and awe, as well as overtly religious emotions such as “feeling the Spirit” (Ferguson, 2019). What is happening in the brain when people have these emotions? Why do human brains experience them at all?

Translating Neurospirituality Into Medical Science

Generally speaking, spirituality routinely helps people create and maintain a sense of transpersonal connection and life purpose. As such, spirituality can be effective for reducing distressing experiences like loneliness and meaninglessness. In this regard, we anticipate that scientific knowledge about the brain’s role in spirituality will generate novel insights for therapeutic interventions that will impact a wide range of clinical symptoms that are aggravated by a lack of connection and meaning, including depression, alcohol and substance use disorders, eating disorders, and self-harming behavior. As our research reveals deeper connections between spirituality and brain circuits, we predict that spiritual therapeutics will constructively integrate with treatments for neurological conditions like pain and movement disorders, on the basis of shared localization to basic functional pathways in the human brain.