No surprise that this headline grabbed my attention. While I have deliberately avoided the phrases “religious intelligence” or “spiritual intelligence,” I have often speculated about the existence of what I term “existential intelligence”—the intelligence that poses and ponders “big questions.” All of us have the capacity to raise big question—about life, love, existence, death—but individuals differ greatly in their capacity and their inclination for pursuing such questions. As I have sometimes quipped “All kids pose big questions—but only a small subset listen for answers and pursue them further.”
Researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have located spiritual concerns in a specific area of the brain—a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning and pain modulation, among other functions. The researchers drew their conclusions from neurosurgical patients who were interviewed about “spiritual acceptance” before and after surgery for a brain tumor. (A similar set of questions were posed to war veterans who had penetrating head trauma).
The findings: out of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Spirituality seems to map on a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductral gray region (known as the PAG). One could readily conclude that the results were random or simply a bell-shaped curve. But the authors also report several case studies of patients who became hyper-religious after certain brain lesions (this finding had been reported in previous decades with respect to patients who exhibit temporal lobe epilepsy).
Given everything that’s been established about evolution in the animal kingdom, I cannot believe that there are certain areas of the brain that relate to, or undergird specifically religious beliefs and behaviors. But I find it quite easy to believe that certain areas of the brain deal with experiences that seem to be enveloping—what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called “an oceanic feeling.” In my own case, those experiences occur specifically when I am playing or listening to music, and in interactions with family members, particularly the youngest and the oldest. My own preference is to call these “existential issues, drawing on existential intelligence”—but if researchers want to invoke the terms “spiritual” or “religious” that’s OK with me.
Clearly, there’s some affinity between the PAG and the capacity to engage in overarching issues. But it will take a lot more research to establish just what functions are subserved by that brain area, how they are manifest, and which procedures or diseases exacerbate or minimize these “existential” inclinations.
Reference
Ferguson, M., Schaper, F., Cohen, A., Siddiqi, S., Nielsen, J., Grafman, J., Urgesi, C., Fabbro, F. and Fox, M., 2021. A neural circuit for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain lesions. Brain Psychiatry, [online] Available at: <https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)01403-7/fulltext> [Accessed 29 June 2021]. As reported in Neuroscience News.