A Christian contemplative practice, centering prayer, can reduce stress and improve well-being. An online intervention study found that participants who practiced centering prayer reported lower stress levels and greater flourishing compared to a control group. The practice involves silent, intentional focus on God's presence, promoting inner calm and emotional balance. These findings suggest that incorporating this spiritual discipline into daily life may offer mental health benefits, including stress relief and enhanced personal growth.
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.
Religious traditions worldwide include specific actions, termed religious motor behaviours, that can be classified using concepts from movement neuroscience and neurology. These behaviours range from decreased motor output, such as ritualistic silence, to increased output like ritual dances. They also vary in the experience of volition: some involve a heightened sense of personal control, while others feel controlled by an external divine source. Examples include repetitive rituals, automatisms with altered volition, and possession-like states. The authors show parallels between these religious behaviours and motor phenomena in neurological disorders, particularly functional neurological symptoms, without pathologizing them. The work highlights how movement neuroscience and religious activity can inform each other.
A recognizable feeling central to the devotional practice of devout Mormons was reproducibly associated with activation in nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and frontal attentional regions. Nucleus accumbens activation preceded peak spiritual feelings by 1–3 seconds and was replicated in four separate tasks. Attentional activation in the anterior cingulate and frontal eye fields was greater in the right hemisphere. The association of abstract ideas and brain reward circuitry may interact with frontal attentional and emotive salience processing, suggesting a mechanism whereby doctrinal concepts may come to be intrinsically rewarding and motivate behavior in religious individuals.