Religion feels like a drug to our brains, study shows

Praying and taking drugs are two very different things. But a new study shows our brains may react to both in a similar way.

Researchers at the University of Utah said that although 5.8 billion people worldwide are religiously affiliated, little has so far been known about how brains react to religious experience. So they designed an experiment that studied brain activity of 19 devout, young Mormons as they were performing a variety of tasks.

“These are areas of the brain that seem like they should be involved in religious and spiritual experience. But yet, religious neuroscience is such a young field — and there are very few studies — and ours was the first study that showed activation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that processes reward," Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah, told CNN.

Anderson, who was the lead author of the study, and his colleagues found that spiritual experiences reward your brain, also like experiencing feelings of love or being moved by music.

They asked study participants to watch a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial statements, pray for six minutes, read scripture for eight minutes, read religious quotes for eight minutes and watch videos of “Mormon Messages” produced by the LDS Church.

After reading scripture and religious quotes, participants were asked if they were “feeling the Spirit” on a scale of 1 to 4. While watching the Mormon Messages videos, which included art of Bible scenes and testimonials from church members, participants were asked to press a button when they had “peak spiritual feelings.”

Scientists examined which part of people’s brains light up on an fMRI as they reported feelings of spirituality.

In addition to the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain associated with reward, the frontal attentional, associated with focused attention, and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, also lit up.

More research is needed to see if the results would be replicated for religious groups other than Mormons.

“Billions of people make important decisions in life based on spiritual and religious feelings and experiences. It’s one of the most powerful influences on our social behavior,” Anderson said. “Yet we know so little about what actually happens in the brain during these experiences. It's just a critical question that needs more study.”

This story was originally published November 30, 2016 at 12:16 PM with the headline "Religion feels like a drug to our brains, study shows."