Can neuroscience discuss religion?

In a previous post, Kim Lang presented the views of several prominent neuroscientists and neurologists on spirituality and religion. With
the knowledge that atheism is prevalent in the scientific community, she wondered how is it that some neuroscientists are nevertheless able to integrate their
religious and scientific beliefs. One of the neuroscientists whose standpoint
she surveyed was Michael Graziano, a Professor of Neuroscience at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Graziano believes that current research on the neurological basis of consciousness proves that spirituality is
not only a natural tendency of humans, but also that its foundations are visible in the very structure of the brain [1].




Several questions arise from Dr. Graziano’s statement, and I will try to shed some light on each.



To start with, is neurotheology actually studying spirituality, religion, or both?
What is the difference between the two? The conceptual separation between the
two terms is definitely blurred. In this interview for Big Think, American Buddhist writer and academic Robert Thurman says
that spirituality is “love and compassion”, is “going into a deeper area of
your mind where you are asserting your free will”, where “you let go of your
self-protective and defensive controls, and what you tap into is the nature of
the universe, the flow of energy interconnecting things”. In contrast, Thurman
believes religion is built upon spirituality, but has taken a secondary role
as a tool of social and state organizations. Rituals and rules specific to each
religion end up regulating the access to the spiritual, and become, in
Thurman’s words, a control rather than a regulating mechanism. Neuroscientist
and philosopher Sam Harris, who has recently authored a book called
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, seems to have similar views on the issue. He explains:




"Although
the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating religion
from spirituality is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two
important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious
doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to
understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally
admit."




While Thurman and Harris see the separation of religion and spirituality as a necessity, Native American
specialist Jack Forbes defines religion in a way that resembles that in which the former two authors define spirituality. For Forbes, religion is the way we live and the dreams, hopes,
and aspirations we have. In Columbus and Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, he
says:



"Religion is not prayer, it is not church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it
has little to do with what white people call ‘religion’. It is our every act."



The controversy around the meanings of religion and spirituality leads me into my next question: What are the research questions asked by neurotheologists? For example, Andrew Newberg,
a neuroscientist who studies the brain functions of various mental states, used
SPECT (single
photon emission computed tomography) to scan the brains of Tibetan
Buddhists and to draw conclusions about “the neurophysiology of religious and
spiritual practices”.

Images
from http://www.andrewnewberg.com/research

He found decreased activation in the parietal lobe (an area responsible for spatial and temporal orientation)
and increased activation in the frontal lobe (region responsible for attention and
concentration) of Buddhists who were instructed to meditate than in those of
participants who did not receive any instructions. In addition, activity in the
frontal lobe and inferior parietal lobe (a language area) increased during
prayer. Should meditation and prayer be taken as processes equally associated
with religion and spirituality? While the results of Dr. Newberg’s study are
truly thought provoking, it is important to not lose sight of what was actually
studied and what domains the results of the research can be extended to.




My third question is, what are the tools with which
neuroscientists are trying to study the brain’s take on religion and
spirituality? I provoke you to the following thought experiment.



God.




Let your mind freely explore the meaning of the word. Allow your senses to paint an
image, produce sounds, smells, tastes, feelings. Embrace the physiological and
emotional states that the word creates within you. Equally welcome the absence
of a reaction.




Now imagine that you were doing this exercise inside an fMRI machine, with the
specific background noise
present at all times, and a gigantic magnet inches above your face. Unless you
have significant training in isolating background noise and other distractors
(or what Dr. Robert Puff calls “finding
the silence in which the noise resides”), you will probably not reach the same
level of focus as you would were you mediating or praying in a dimly lit room
infused with the smell of incense or in a natural setting that smelled of
blossom, either alone or with others who are also seeking that transcendental,
spiritual state of the mind.




Yet, these are the kind of
procedures from which the field of neurotheology extracts its data and draws
its conclusions. In 2008, for example, a team of neuroscientists led by Sam
Harris at the University
of California in Los Angeles measured brain activation in committed Christian
believers and nonbelievers who were presented with various religious and
nonreligious propositions – like “The Biblical God really exists” and “Santa
Clause is a myth” – that they had to judge as either true or false [2]. The results of the study suggested that both religious and
nonreligious belief – in other words, statements that participants judged to be
true – was correlated with greater activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (see image below).

Belief minus disbelief in Both
Categories, Both Groups – image from Harris et al, 2010

This area is associated with representation of self, theory of mind, reward,
emotional associations, and goal-driven behavior. Added to other studies that
found religion to be related to medial prefrontal cortex circuitry [3] [4] or
even to the activity of the left hemisphere [5], this
study seemed to suggest that sustaining religious activities requires the activation
of particular brain areas.




I will return to the fact that religion
is widespread. Nine-in-ten Americans believe in the existence of God or
consider themselves spiritual [6] Is the religious or spiritual experience
simply a cognitive tendency that has been shaped by evolution? Cognitive
scientists such as Pascal Boyer, for example, have explained that the
propensity to religion is a consequence of the social nature of humans [7]. Our brains are built to deal with large amounts of social
information, and do that constantly. In order to integrate in today’s complex
societies, we spend incredible amounts of time creating, evaluating, and
updating our social relationships. Consider the amount of time we spend trying
to understand what others think and why they think it. Think about the ease
with which we remember faces, compared to other objects or even other parts of
the body [8]. Now, remember the occasion when you looked at the sky and
saw a cloud shaped like a human face, or when your breakfast toast had a
human-like design on it. We seek agency continuously, or, as Pascal Boyer calls
this phenomenon, we have a hyperactive agency detection system. So can it be
that gods and other supernatural agents exist because we are cognitively
disposed to believe in their existence? They certainly seem to master large
amounts of socially relevant information, and people often turn to them for
answers and guidance. The fact that gods and supernatural agents often have the
powers or characteristics of humans only makes them more memorable.




It might well be that spirituality is a cognitive by-product of the social
tendencies of humans. But even so, can
religion be a process within the reach of an empirical framework? Few neuroscientists
venture so far as to say that religion/spirituality is a product of activating certain
brain areas, rather remaining in the more neutral territory of “associated
with” and “important for”. As neuroscience research attempts to penetrate
spirituality, it will be fascinating to discuss the diversity in religious
experience, atheism, and why people who live in radically different
circumstances nevertheless share a similar connection with a god, gods, or
other transcendental spirits.




As for now, I
suggest that the field of neuroscience is too young to draw any conclusions about
religion and spirituality. While questioning the neurological basis of spirituality
is indeed fascinating, there is no clear consensus on how these brain processes
should be studied. Furthermore, technology available to do so is still not
sensitive enough. And even if the research methods agreed, and technological
advancements promised accurate results, what are we to do with the findings of
this kind of research? I believe that while this research is indeed promising,
there are many ethical matters arising around assigning something as intangible
as spirituality to a brain mechanism. Those who study spirituality and
religion, therefore, should be sincere about the potency of their research
methods and techniques, meticulous about their generalizations, and straightforward
in their reports to the public.






References




[1] Graziano, Michael. "The Spirit Constructed in the Brain." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com,
29 Apr. 2011. Web.




[2] Harris S, Kaplan JT, Curiel A, Bookheimer SY, Iacoboni M, Cohen MS (2009) The neuralcorrelates of religious and nonreligious belief. PLoS One 4(10): e7272.




[3] Azari NP, Nickel J, Wunderlich G (2001) Neural correlates of religious experience. Eur. J. Neurosci.




[4] Muramoto O (2004) The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in human religious activity. Med Hypotheses. 62(4): 479-85.




[5] Ramachandran VS (2010) “Split Brain with One Half Atheist and One Half Theist”. Youtube video www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64




[6]"Summary of Key Findings." Statistics on Religion in America Report. PewResearch. http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#. Retrieved 04 Sept. 2014.




[7] Boyer, P (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.




[8] Waxman OB (2014) “It’s ‘Perfectly Normal’ to see Jesus in Toast, Study Says”. Time, Newsfeed Science http://time.com/90810/its-perfectly-normal-to-see-jesus-in-toast-study-says/



Forbes J.D. (2008) Columbus and Cannibals: The Wétiko
Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Seven Stories Press.






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Lucaciu, I. (2014). Can neuroscience discuss religion? The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2014/10/can-neuroscience-discuss-religion.html

Stress Rx: Chant two Ommsss, with food, twice daily

How can and should meditation be used to restore physical and mental health in a clinical setting?  That is the question that Emory University neuroscience graduate student Jordan Kohn posed to begin the latest Neuroethics Journal Club.  The discussion thereafter centered on Black et al.’s 2013 Psychoneuroendocrinology paper entitled “Yogic meditation reverses NF-κB and IRF-related transcriptome dynamics in leukocytes of family dementia caregivers in a randomized controlled trial.”¹ This paper laudably attempts to bridge the mind-body gap and suggests a biological, and perhaps more importantly, a genetic mechanism to explain how yoga can apparently help relieve stress, protect against depression, and restore immune function in caregivers.  The implications of this line of investigation could be widespread as the scientific and medical communities grapple with our fundamental understanding of the mind and body and how to integrate what used to be considered fringe or alternative approaches into the mainstream.



Caregivers for dementia patients have been widely studied because they experience high levels of chronic stress and in turn suffer high rates of depression and other mental and physical health problems.² Both acute and chronic stress can drastically alter immune system function³ and, not surprisingly, dementia patient caregivers show marked impairments in immunological measures.⁴ The connection between the immune system and mental health is increasingly studied for its apparent bi-directionality.  Sickness behavior – characterized by fatigue, poor sleep, irritability, and lack of appetite – closely resembles major depression.  In fact, pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are up-regulated during an infection, can induce depression.⁴





In this study, participants were randomly assigned to practice the Kirtan Kriya Meditation, guided by an audio CD, for only 12 minutes per day, or to listen to a CD of relaxing music for the same amount of time each day.  After 8 weeks, nearly two thirds of the meditators had improved depression scale scores of at least 50% and most of them also scored 50% better than they had at baseline on a cognitive test.  Significantly fewer music listeners improved by 50% in either of these measures. These data had actually been, in part, reported previously⁶ but in this study the authors sought to determine whether meditation modulated gene expression in an attempt to understand how yogic meditation mechanistically elicits these beneficial effects.  Black and colleagues assessed genome-wide expression levels at baseline and post-treatment for both groups and also performed more focused analyses on genes related to immune system function or under the control of the well-known transcription factors NF-κB and IRF-1.⁹  They found that there was a significant reduction in the expression of genes that respond to NF- κB and an increase in those that can be activated by IRF-1 which, together would suggest a decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines and a better functioning immune system.



This paper, along with a growing literature on the clinical benefits of meditation, raises the question of how ecologically valid such studies are and how one would, on a practical level, implement such interventions.  For one thing there is the issue of standardization.  Several high-profile meta-analyses have been performed to try to answer the question of whether meditative interventions actually improve clinical measures but only a fraction of relevant studies can be included in any one analysis due, at least in part, to the heterogeneity of interventions and study designs.^7,8 This has led to poor power which has made it difficult to determine what effect these interventions actually have.⁹ A second question is in what contexts should meditation be most appropriately prescribed? Our journal club facilitator, Jordan Kohn, noted that meditation has been shown to be useful for people incarcerated in prison and perhaps uniquely beneficial for training the military to cultivate their ‘Warrior Minds’ (though there may be additional ethical concerns for some). However, there may not be a one-size-fits all approach to meditation. While there might be benefit for stress reduction in Alzheimer’s caregivers, or cultivating compassion in those who are incarcerated, or creating sharper minds for our military personnel, Jordan mentioned that there may be some individuals who would not find benefit and might actually be harmed, by certain kinds of meditation. For example, individuals who suffered PTSD might only relive their trauma more vividly during their meditation sessions.



An important issue that this paper speaks to indirectly is the apparent necessity to have biological data to support psychological findings.  This is undoubtedly an important pursuit as it may lead to new therapeutic targets, but it also seems to be missing the point.  Does a psychological or mind-based intervention absolutely need to affect biological measures (in the body) in order to be valid?  In this case, the reported effect is most likely indirect where meditation helps to relieve perceptions of stress which may allow hormone levels to normalize and the immune system to get back to business as usual.  Since the authors do not report effects on any of the biological “levels” between the mind and gene transcripts in immune tissue, their genetics results serve mainly to support the aforementioned psychological data but do not really extend the findings.  However, in the public one can easily find alternative medicine skeptics as well as enthusiasts who are already mesmerized by the exoticism of meditative traditions and alternative medicine. Having a biological marker as compelling as genetic data might convince skeptics that meditation has true validity and is worthy of future funding and integration into clinical care.



Another question along these lines is whether biological measures – which can be altered by meditation – can shift a sense of disease responsibility?  It is well known that not every individual who is exposed to trauma or put under stress will develop a stress-related pathology.  Some people seem to be resilient.  If the remedy for those who are not resilient is a drug that alters neurochemistry, then one would think that the susceptibility must have been due to a pre-existing chemical imbalance – a biological deficit so to speak.  But if the prescribed therapy is to train yourself in mindfulness, then does that mean the disease is the result of a character or personality flaw?  That is, if a patient can just use his/her mind to reduce stress through meditation should the patient just summon the moral fortitude to not be so affected by stress to begin with?  One wonders if prescribing something like a pill versus meditation, indicates that the patient needs “real” medicine for their illness because it is something out of the patient’s control.  These and other issues are likely to be continually discussed as alternative approaches including meditation are increasingly studied and expanded into clinical settings.





References



1.  Black, D. S. et al. Yogic meditation reverses NF-kappa B and IRF-related transcriptome dynamics in leukocytes of family dementia caregivers in a randomized controlled trial. Psychoneuroendocrinology 38, 348-355, doi:DOI 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2012.06.011 (2013).

2.  Pinquart, M. & Sorensen, S. Differences between caregivers and noncaregivers in psychological health and physical health: A meta-analysis. Psychol Aging 18, 250-267, doi:Doi 10.1037/0882-7974.18.2.250 (2003).

3.  Dhabhar, F. S. & McEwen, B. S. Acute stress enhances while chronic stress suppresses cell-mediated immunity in vivo: A potential role for leukocyte trafficking. Brain Behav Immun 11, 286-306, doi:DOI 10.1006/brbi.1997.0508 (1997).

4.  Lovell, B. & Wetherell, M. A. The cost of caregiving: Endocrine and immune implications in elderly and non elderly caregivers. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 35, 1342-1352, doi:DOI 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.02.007 (2011).

5.  Dantzer, R., O'Connor, J. C., Freund, G. G., Johnson, R. W. & Kelley, K. W. From inflammation to sickness and depression: when the immune system subjugates the brain. Nature reviews. Neuroscience 9, 46-56, doi:10.1038/nrn2297 (2008).

6.  Lavretsky, H. et al. A pilot study of yogic meditation for family dementia caregivers with depressive symptoms: effects on mental health, cognition, and telomerase activity. International journal of geriatric psychiatry 28, 57-65, doi:10.1002/gps.3790 (2013).

7.  Goyal, M. et al. Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA internal medicine 174, 357-368, doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018 (2014).

8.  Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S. & Walach, H. Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits. A meta-analysis. Journal of psychosomatic research 57, 35-43, doi:10.1016/S0022-3999(03)00573-7 (2004).

9.  Bartlett, T. "Wait, So Does Meditation Actually Work or Not?" in Percolator  (Chronicle.com, 2014).

10.  NF-κB and IRF-1 are transcription factors which, when activated by an extracellular signal, can induce the expression of a variety proteins in order to mount a cellular response. NF-κB is typically associated with an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines whereas IRF-1 induces interferon beta, an antiviral cytokine.







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Purcell, R. (2014). Stress Rx: Chant two Ommsss, with food, twice daily. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2014/04/stress-rx-chant-two-ommsss-with-food.html