Damage to specific regions in the left and right inferior posterior parietal cortex can increase self-transcendence, a personality trait linked to spiritual feelings and behaviors. Combining personality assessments before and after neurosurgery with brain-lesion mapping, the authors found that selective damage to these parietal areas induced a specific increase in self-transcendence, suggesting that neural activity in temporoparietal areas can rapidly modulate this normally stable trait. The findings point to an active role of left and right parietal systems in self-transcendence and offer insights into the neurobiological basis of altered spiritual and religious attitudes in neurological and mental disorders.
Spirituality arises from the brain's predictive processing of bodily signals, distinct from religiosity. Evidence from neuroimaging, lesion, and brain stimulation studies shows that deactivating temporoparietal areas amplifies self-transcendent experiences, and transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation weakens implicit spiritual self-associations. Behavioral experiments demonstrate that inducing prior beliefs in an interoceptive task selectively enhances implicit spirituality but not religiosity, while manipulating prediction error reliability affects interoceptive accuracy without altering spiritual or religious self-representations. These dissociable effects support a computational distinction: spirituality emerges from dynamic modulation of self-related interoceptive representations, offering testable hypotheses about distinct neural architectures.
Self-transcendence, the shift of experience away from the self toward others, nature, or broader meaning, is a key aspect of human psychology, but its neural basis was unclear. By applying lesion network mapping to 88 neurosurgical patients assessed before and after surgery for trait self-transcendence, a distributed brain network was identified whose disruption alters this capacity. This network overlapped with the default mode network and frontoparietal control subnetworks. Posterior midline regions were the most stable correlates of increased self-transcendence after lesions. The findings suggest that posterior midline hubs constrain, while brainstem and anterior midline regions facilitate, self-transcendent experience.