Music, Spirituality, Religion, and the Human Brain
Petr Janata, Ph.D. & Robin Sylvan, Ph.D.
Executive Summary
The connection between music, spirituality, and religion is so widespread as to be nearly universal. Since the dawn of humanity and across a broad spectrum of cultures around the world, music and musical experience have been an integral part of spirituality and religion. Strangely, there has been very little scholarly research on this topic. In this project, Drs. Janata & Sylvan, together with a group of leading researchers, will examine the relationship between these integral aspects of human culture in terms of underlying psychological and neuroscientific principles. Their approach is to examine this relationship at three levels of analysis. Accordingly, their project is arranged into three themes.
Theme 1: "Music and Spirituality: A Universal Connection"
A study of the link between music, spirituality, and religion in six study groups which represent a broad spectrum of religious and spiritual experience. Two of these groups are from mainstream Western religions (a Pentecostal congregation and a Jewish synagogue), two are from non-Western religions (a Hindu temple and a Yoruba/West African temple), and two are from non-religious but spiritual musical communities (the rave/electronic dance music scene, and the "jam-band" scene). Personal interviews and structured surveys administered to members of these groups will identify the aspects of music and musical experiences that create and/or shape spiritual/religious experiences.
Theme 2: "Music, the Self, and Spiritual Experience"
A study to examine the factors believed to play a role in spiritual experiences related to music in the context of structured psychological experiments. The experiments are organized into two projects that emphasize complementary aspects of musical experiences. Project 1 focuses directly on the memories, thoughts, and emotions that are triggered while a person listens to salient and non-salient excerpts of music. Project 2 focuses on the role of sensorimotor synchronization in the emotional and spiritual experience of music.
Theme 3: "A Neurobiological Theory of Music and Spiritual Experience"
The experimental paradigms elaborated in Theme 2 are adapted slightly to facilitate the collection of neurophysiological data. The physiological measures that will be collected include autonomic nervous system responses, the electroencephalogram (EEG), and blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals collected in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. These data will be collected to test specific hypotheses about the brain circuits that are active during music-related spiritual experiences. Specifically, the researchers postulate that the medial prefrontal cortex, known to mediate interactions between emotion and cognition and maintain a sense of self, will show heightened activity at times when the subject experiences a strong emotional/spiritual response to the music. This response may come about when listening to a highly salient piece of music (Project 1) or through active musical interaction in the form of tapping along with rhythmic musical stimuli (Project 2).
Signficance
This proposal exhibits scientific merit in several ways. First, it scrutinizes commonly held beliefs about what makes music a potent emotional and spiritual stimulus across several disciplines and levels of analysis. Second, with a simple but clever manipulation of task instructions, it links emotion with a considerable body of research on sensorimotor integration. Finally, through its use of religious and secular study groups, the research allows a well-balanced and controlled assessment of how emotion, spirituality, and religiousness interact in the context of musical experience, which itself is at the core of human experience.
The implications of this research are broad. Religion, spirituality, and music are central aspects of cultures around the world. The public devotes tremendous time and resources in pursuit of them. However, the scientific understanding of these phenomena is weak, given their importance to our species. This project is an unprecedented effort to rigorously examine their interconnectedness.
