We will use lesion mapping and functional neuroimaging experiments to study the brain bases of attachment to God and other significant figures. Our first two experiments will use already collected data from Vietnam Veterans with focal penetrating brain injuries to examine the causal effects of brain injuries on the relationships between attachment, emotions, and the strength of belief in God and other religious beliefs. Experiment 3 is designed to develop normative script narratives signifying an attachment to God or other Adults and to prepare individual script statements as probes in the next three experiments. In experiment 4, we will compare brain activation patterns when script events related to God or other Adults must be categorized into one of two categories or whether the script event has high versus low emotional ratings. We hypothesize that distinctive patterns of brain activation will be found in an emotion x attachment to God interaction compared to attachments to other adults. Experiment 5 will examine the pattern of brain activation for the effects of script events that are in the correct or incorrect orders for both God-related and Adult-related script events. Experiment 6 is similar to experiment 5 except that instead of presenting scripts out of the correct order, we will omit a relevant or irrelevant script event that ordinarily would be expected to follow a previous script event. The strength of activation in frontal brain structures should indicate the strength of the attachment representation in those brain areas. These lesion mapping and functional neuroimaging studies will provide convergent evidence about the role of different regions, particularly in the human prefrontal cortex, that represent attachment to God versus others with a significant differentiation occurring when the emotional content of the processes script events is high. The studies we are proposing will provide convergent and comprehensive evidence based on behavioral studies, lesion mapping studies, and functional neuroimaging studies about the brain basis of attachment to God. Moreover, we will obtain evidence about the specificity of the pattern of brain activation elicited by secure base events that are directly related to attachment to God compared to other attachments, about the brain areas that appear crucial for forming attachment styles that are associated with an individual’s relationship with God and for the relationship between emotional processes and attachment to God. In addition, we will look at the strength of secure base script event representation in the brain by detecting brain responses to prediction errors characterized by counterfactual events, omitted events, or events out of order in a script. Attachment styles to other adults compared to God may require the same social-emotional-cognitive processes but are likely to have distinctive features that will be reflected in different brain networks devoted to specific attachment objects (e.g., God vs Parental). Our studies will be among the first to try and identify those distinctive features and identify the brain networks devoted to the faithful brain.

We will systematically test the hypothesis that the cognitive materials for apprehension of, affectively relating to and cognizing supernatural agents (SAs) are formed in REM dreams. Using an intensive longitudinal design N=150 participants who vary in their baseline levels of religiosity will receive a battery of personality, cognitive, neuropsych, religiosity, IQ, and mood function tests to establish baseline values in all of these domains of functioning. They will then undergo two weeks of daily assessments of mood, cognitive function, daily activities, closeness to god ratings, religiosity and dream reports. N=75 of these will wear neurophysiologic DREEM headbands to capture sleep stages, sleep quality and REM theta activity over medial temporal and prefrontal cortex during REM sleep. We will use structural equation modeling to test our preregistered prediction that closeness to god ratings will vary systematically with REM theta activity but not with control measures. Other statistically controlled contrasts will involve comparisons on all measures between highly religious vs low/non- religious, male vs female, theists vs non-theists, and other relevant contrasts. Data from the 2-week longit archive on all 150 subjects will be used to build-out and calibrate settings and threshold values on a neurocomputational model of the REM theta system’s, and dream content’s role in facilitating affective and cognitive interactions with SAs.

We will test the hypothesis that autism and psychosis represent, and manifest in, extremes of key traits underlying religious and spiritual neurocognition. In particular, the autism spectrum is characterized by sharper self-other boundaries, decreases in affective and attachment-related contact, increases in mechanistic cognition, decreased imagination, increased relative fluid intelligence, decreased belief in the supernatural, reduced tendency to believe in a God or gods, reduced theory of mind, increased belief in physical-world concepts of God, and increased utilitarianism. All of these factors are expected to strongly influence neurocognitive mechanisms and psychological manifestations of God and spirituality. In contrast to the autism spectrum, psychosis, and its expressions in positive schizotypy, involve more-permeable self-other boundaries, amplified mentalistic thought, reduced mechanistic cognition, reduced fluid intelligence, increased belief in the supernatural, and more highly-developed imagination. In this study, high-autistic cognition and high-positively schizotypal cognition groups of healthy individuals will be compared using a comprehensive suite of psychological questionnaires, and a parallel suite of neuroimaging measures designed to parse core determinants of religious and spiritual neurocognition. The questionnaire data will focus on quantifying relevant aspects of religiosity, autism, and positive schizotypy, and key variables hypothesized to mediate religious neurocognition. The neuroimaging data collection will dovetail with the questionnaire data, with scanner activities set up to discern: (1) differential neural activations during task-related cognition regarding agency of God, agency of nonreligious supernatural agents, human agency, and natural, physical agency; (2) differential activations during task-related cognition regarding Theory of God’s mind, Theory of a non-god supernatural agent’s mind, Theory of (human) mind, and physical-world theory of mind; (3) differential activations during task-related cognition regarding religion-based morality, human law-based morality, utilitarian moral systems; (4) differential activations during task-related cognition regarding affective attachment to God, affective attachment to other humans, and affective attachment to physical objects or systems.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disorder affecting multiple physical and psychological systems of 6.2 million patients worldwide. Substantial extant research has demonstrated significant changes in religiosity among patients with PD who exhibit Left-onset Parkinson’s Disease (LOPD) relative to patients with Right-onset Parkinson’s Disease (ROPD) and age-matched controls with other chronic diseases. The central question this study will address is “To what extent do changes in religious cognition in this patient population (LOPD) involve alterations (relative to ROPD controls) in the internal working models (IWMs) of attachment and the emotional-social sense of attachment to God versus ordinary but significant others?” With PD-specialized neurologists’ collaboration, appropriate participants will be recruited from movement disorder clinics. The proposed mixed-methods study will compare 100+ LOPD participants to their natural controls (100+ ROPD participants), both cross-sectionally and longitudinally at study launch (T1) and one year later (T2) regarding their neuropsychologic function and IWMs (attachment content, quality, and intensity) toward God in comparison to significant others. Participants will engage in a modified Religious Attachment Interview at T1 and T2, which will explore each participant’s life history, emphasizing their attachment to and engagement with a monotheistic deity, IWM changes, and religious/spiritual beliefs and experiences over time. A comprehensive neuropsychologic battery at both T1 and T2 will assess changes in brain functions, cognition, and religious/spiritual functions (e.g., Attachment to God, Religious/Spiritual Coping). Whereas interviews will be thematically analyzed, quantitative data will be analyzed using MANCOVA and repeated measures ANCOVA to assess time-linked changes in IWMs, theistic beliefs, and religious experiences between LOPD and ROPD while controlling for potential confounds. The proposed study will be the first attempt to identify the exact nature of the religiosity changes documented in patients with LOPD — specifically insofar as these changes involve attachment and commitment to a monotheistic deity.

Recent research has identified possible neuropsychological mechanisms to explain theistic relational processing (i.e., how one relates to god), although questions remain as to how this process relates to other social relational processes (i.e., how one relates to others). This project proposes to validate a neuropsychological model that suggests that the right hemisphere association area (RHAA) integrates various neuropsychological processes (i.e., sensations, thoughts, emotions, schema) into a “sense of self/mineness” that allows for the experience of relationship to others (i.e., god, individuals). The model hypothesizes that inhibiting this sense of self allows for “selfless” theistic relational experiences (e.g., spiritual transcendence) reported by mystics throughout history, while activating this sense of self allows for the experience of “self-integrated” social relational experiences (i.e., experiencing other’s thoughts/emotions as “mine”). To demonstrate a causal relationship between the RHAA, sense of self, and theistic/social relational processes, a longitudinal fMRI study of individuals with neurological disorders will be conducted that involves both objective and subjective measures of theistic (i.e., transcendence) and social relational processing (i.e., moral character traits). The sample will include 60 individuals with neurologic dysfunction (half with primarily right hemisphere lesions, half with primarily left hemisphere lesions) including 30 with stroke (who are expected to improve over time) and 30 with multiple sclerosis (who are expected to decline over time). Participants will be followed over a 12-month period and will complete fMRIs and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy at baseline and 12-month follow-up, as well as measures of disorders of the self, theistic relational processing (i.e., spiritual transcendence), religious beliefs/behaviors, and social relational processing (i.e., empathy, altruism). Consistent with the goals of the John Templeton Foundation, this project will significantly increase interaction between the sciences and humanities to better our understanding of human nature, leading to better relationships with one another, the cosmos, and the divine.

Although religious texts such as the Bible frequently use metaphor to convey the relationship between God and humans, relatively little is known about the cognitive styles of engaging religious narratives. This project examines cognition-emotion interactions and their underlying brain processes involved in metaphoric interpretation of Biblical text. A distinction has been made between metaphoric and literal-logical cognitive styles at least since Plato’s criticism of poetry as impeding reason. Early Christian theologians such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen allowed for both literal-logical and metaphoric interpretations of the Bible, but emphasized the metaphoric approach as spiritually superior. Over time, several cultural transformations shifted the emphasis toward literal approaches. One example is the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West and the subsequent incorporation of Aristotelian deductive and inductive tools of reason into Christian theology. Another is that the successes of the scientific revolution led Francis Bacon and others to propose treating Biblical content as literal-historical propositions to be tested with the scientific method. Given recent research showing that metaphor facilitates meaning-making, perhaps especially in contexts of uncertainty, metaphoric approaches to the Bible may have existential benefits over literal approaches. This project examines whether metaphoric (vs. literal-historical) interpretation of Biblical narrative is more likely in participants after an awe-induction, given that awe involves uncertainty and transcendence and has been proposed to be central to religious/spiritual experience. We believe this work will contribute to phenomenological approaches to religion by helping to identify (i) the effect of awe-related transcendent experience on metaphoric interpretation of religious narrative, (ii) the neural and psychological mechanisms through which the experience of awe promotes metaphoricity and perceived life meaning, and (iii) psychological traits with distinctive neural signatures (i.e., autistic and schizotypal traits) and individual differences in spiritual practice and God representations that may moderate the main effects.

Among the many properties of our brain, a most fascinating one is its Bayesian functioning. Through statistical inference and reasoning, we generate beliefs and update them with incoming data. Although most of our thoughts follow probabilistic rules, there are some exceptions. Belief in God is one of them. How our brain constructs and maintains vivid God representations despite the absence of any actual personal experience is a challenging question for neuroscience. We hypothesize that the experience of faith is also embodied at the sensory, e.g. visual and interoceptive, level of believers’ cognitive system. First, using visual psychophysics (reverse correlation) and fMRI tasks, we will study whether and how the image of God is activated within the face-processing system of believers from the three main monotheistic faiths (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim), and whether this activation is modulated by attachment to God. Second, with transcutaneous vagal stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, and a binocular rivalry task we will investigate how enhanced body afferences modulate awareness of one’s faith. The results of this project would show for the first time the direct effect of bodily afferences on faith representation as a function of religious belief and commitment to worship. Examining how humans introspect on the nature of their religious experience and on the form, they attribute to God will provide new insights, aside from the identification of the involved neural circuits, into the deeply rooted mind/body connections that support our capacity to construct vivid mental representations of transcendental entities. Understanding God sensory representation in the brain might reveal universal characteristics of the religious experience despite differences in dogma.

Spirituality (S) and religiosity (R) refer to the complex pattern of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that reflects a view of the human condition in relation to self-transcendent contexts, unseen entities, and supernatural agents. According to a predictive coding account of cognition, there is a hierarchical organization of the brain in which each layer builds upon priors’ beliefs (top-down processes) about the external and internal world’s states trying to attenuate the predicting error estimated from input information. Crucially, S&R have been associated with greater reliance on priors, at the expense of the processing of prediction-error, in the perception of internal and external events. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a novel behavioral approach allowing for the selective manipulation of priors and error monitoring for interoceptive (heartbeat counting) and exteroceptive (visual binocular rivalry) processing and test the resulting plastic changes of S&R as measured with an implicit association test procedure and questionnaires. The moderating role of schizotypal and autistic traits are also considered. In a first stage, the effects of behavioral manipulations of interoceptive vs. exteroceptive predictions on distinct oscillatory mechanisms and S&R are studied by recording high-density electroencephalography. In the second stage, these brain oscillations are entrained by tuning the frequency of low-intensity alternating (rhythmic) currents applied on the scalp surface with transcranial alternating current stimulation. Overall, the results of the studies will contribute to decipher the brain oscillation code associated to S&R processing, also considering interindividual differences, and to use this code to entrain neural activity and modulate spirituality and religiosity. This will shed light on the neurocognitive foundations of S&R within a general view of the human mind. The project ultimately aids to the neuroscience of religious cognition and paves the way for new interventions to treat disorders of self-representations.