SALT LAKE CITY — How does one’s brain react to spiritual rituals? A University of Utah research team is attempting to gain a better understanding of that question by studying the brains of returned missionaries.

Jeffrey Anderson, associate professor of radiology and functional imaging at the U. of U., has long studied brain scans of individuals on the autism spectrum and who have Down syndrome. Now, he is looking at the social brain in a different way, looking at the brain’s expression of spiritual experiences of religious individuals.

“Much of our research has to do with disease states and medical conditions,” Anderson said. “And every once in awhile, we get the opportunity to peel back the curtain and look at some more profound or fundamental, basic neuroscience about how the brain works and what that means for human nature and experiences that are really important and valuable for us.”

Anderson and the Religious Brain Project team, including Michael Ferguson and Jared Nielsen, will conduct a study of approximately 20 returned missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who are still active and believe in their faith tradition. The participants will be presented with spiritual material — videos, hymns, scriptures — during an hourlong MRI scan.

“What we’re really asking people do is identify, in the environment of an MRI scanner, ‘I’m feeling something now,’ ” Anderson said.

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Anderson said the team doesn’t know what to expect in the study, as there is little literature on the topic. Currently, the only literature about neuroscience and spirituality concerns Eastern religious traditions.

“Many of our studies that we’ve done have dealt with what we call the social brain. This is a set of brain regions that helps our brains to navigate social interactions: so things like language, empathy and other feelings,” Anderson said. “It turns out this is a remarkably important part of the brain that is one of the core functions of our brains as human beings. These studies about autism and Down syndrome and how the social brain may be functional or not has led to interest in other ways of looking at human social interactions in the brain. One of the most profound instances of that are these really deep feelings of connection we have to something outside of ourselves. It’s very much related to trying to explore how the brain processes sociality.”

The team chose to look at LDS Church members between the ages of 20 and 30 who have served missions because of three main reasons, Anderson said. The individuals are typically young and healthy, there is a “generous spirit of participation” in research in the community, and they have thousands of hours of practice in identifying spiritual or religious feelings.

“There is a growing research, literature, in the social sciences that religious communities may have higher metrics of what’s called pro-sociality," he said. "Things like lower divorce rates, lower criminality, higher charitable giving. There’s some controversy in the social science community about what this means and what the source of it may be. So one of the questions that interests us is, can we see effects of religious and spiritual practice? Just the core rituals that individuals do like prayer and spiritual text reading — do those effect or condition the brain toward sociality? That's a really important question to us.”

Researchers are still looking for study participants who can take a survey and submit an application for participation online. Additionally, on Feb. 27 at 7 p.m., the authors will host a seminar addressing the study.

Anderson said he hopes this study will expand in the future beyond the brain images and delve into genetic and biochemical influences on religious experiences.

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