People across cultures and throughout history report spiritual experiences that involve a sense of union transcending the ordinary self, but their neural mechanisms are poorly understood. Using an individualized guided-imagery task, the authors compared brain activity during personally meaningful spiritual experiences with that during stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. During spiritual experiences, the left inferior parietal lobule showed reduced activity compared to neutral-relaxing experiences, suggesting this region contributes to perceptual processing and self-other representations. Compared to stress cues, spiritual cues reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions linked to sensory and emotional processing. The findings point to neural mechanisms underlying broadly defined, personally experienced spirituality.
Spiritual experiences engage a distributed brain network, particularly a ventral frontotemporal circuit, that activates at the start and end of a spiritual condition but not during stress or neutral-relaxing conditions. The degree of network engagement correlated strongly with participants' self-reported spirituality during the task and moderately with a separate measure of spirituality taken outside the scanner. These findings suggest a specific functional neural network underlies spiritual experiences and may help explain how spirituality supports recovery from behavioral addictions.
Cannabis beverages, legalized in Canada in 2019, produce different acute and long-term effects than dried flower or edible products due to distinct absorption and processing in the body. A systematic review of 29 studies found that healthy, infrequent users experienced aversive subjective and physiological effects after consuming cannabis beverages. Many products also had inaccurate cannabinoid labeling, posing consumer risks. The research highlights the limited and inconsistent evidence on cannabis beverages, compounded by the wide variety of formulations, and underscores the need for more direct studies on their safety and effects.