The Bodily Instantiation of Spiritual Feelings

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.

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Abstract

This chapter explores the neurocognitive underpinnings of spirituality, with particular emphasis on the role of predictive processing of bodily signals in shaping spiritual, but not religious experiences. Integrating predictive coding models with findings from neuroimaging, lesion, and brain stimulation studies, it argues that spirituality is deeply embodied, arising from altered precision-weighting of bodily signals. This chapter reviews neuropsychological and neurophysiological data indicating that a deactivation of temporoparietal cortical areas can amplify self-transcendent experiences, and that transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation can attenuate implicit spiritual self-associations. Experimental evidence from behavioral paradigms demonstrated that inducing prior beliefs of priors in an interoceptive task selectively enhances implicit spirituality, but not religiosity, while manipulation of prediction error reliability modulated interoceptive accuracy but not spiritual or religious self-representations. These dissociable effects support a computational distinction, where, differently from religiosity, spirituality emerges from dynamic modulation of self-related interoceptive representations. This chapter thus situates spirituality within a predictive framework of the processing of bodily signals, offering testable hypotheses about the distinct neural architectures of spirituality and religiosity that can advance the neuroscience of religious cognition.