科學家或已找到與靈性相關的大腦區域
Scientists might have found the part of the brain responsible for spirituality
科學家或已找到與靈性相關的大腦區域
An understanding of the origin of spiritual experiences within the brain could have useful applications elsewhere in medicine.
了解靈性體驗的腦內起源，或在醫學領域大有用途。
Scientists have identified a possible neurobiological home for the spiritual experience—the sense of connection to something greater than oneself.
科學家或許已經找到了靈性體驗的神經生物學解釋。靈性體驗是指人們感受到超出自身的存在。
Activity in the parietal cortex, an area of the brain involved in awareness of self and others as well as attention processing, seems to be a common element among individuals who have experienced a variety of spiritual experiences, according to a study in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
《大腦皮層》（Cerebral Cortex）期刊的一項研究表明，有過各種靈性體驗的人群，大腦右後頂葉皮層普遍處於活躍狀態。大腦右後頂葉皮層是大腦中參與自我與他人認知和注意力控制的區域。
「Spiritual experiences are robust states that may have profound impacts on people』s lives,」 says Marc Potenza, professor of psychiatry, of the Yale Child Study Center, and of neuroscience.
耶魯大學兒童研究中心精神病學教授兼神經科學教授馬克?波滕扎（Marc Potenza）稱，「靈性體驗是很強大的一種狀態，能對人們的生活產生深遠的影響。」
「Understanding the neural bases of spiritual experiences may help us better understand their roles in resilience and recovery from mental health and addictive disorders,」 he says.
波滕扎表示：「了解靈性體驗的神經基礎，能夠幫助我們更好地發揮靈性體驗在精神健康康復和成癮性疾病治療中的作用。」
Spiritual experiences can be religious in nature or not, such as a feeling of oneness in nature or the absence of self during sporting events.
靈性體驗在本質上可以是宗教性的，也可以不具有任何宗教意義，例如天人合一的感覺，或是人們在觀看體育賽事時感到脫離自我。
Researchers interviewed 27 young adults to gather information about past stressful and relaxing experiences as well as their spiritual experiences. The subjects then underwent fMRI scans while listening for the first time to recordings based on their personalized experiences.
研究者採訪了27名年輕人，邀請他們講述自己過去感到壓力或者放鬆時的體驗以及他們之前的靈性體驗，並收集這些信息。然後，為受試者播放基於他們自身靈性體驗生成的錄音，在第一次播放時，對受試者進行功能性磁共振成像掃描。
While individual experiences differed, researchers noted similar patterns of activity in the parietal cortex as the subjects imagined experiencing the events in the recordings.
結果表明，儘管個體體驗各不相同，受試者在想像自己體驗錄音里的事件時，他們的大腦右後頂葉皮層活躍形式相似。
Potenza stresses other brain areas are probably also involved in formation of spiritual experiences. The method can help future researchers study spiritual experience and its impact on mental health, he says.
波滕扎強調，大腦的其他區域也有可能參與靈性體驗的形成。他認為，這種方法可以幫助研究者進一步研究靈性體驗及其對心理健康的影響。
Lisa Miller of Columbia University is first author of the study.
來自哥倫比亞大學的麗薩·米勒（Lisa Miller）是此項研究的第一作者。
初譯 | 王思琳
審校 | 張思琦
定稿 | 張思琦
本文由有譯思翻譯團隊翻譯
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