P 140. Virtual lesions of the inferior parietal and prefrontal cortex alter implicit religiousness and spirituality in healthy individuals

Abstract

Belief in a higher power constitutes a core feature of religiousness and spirituality (RS), two ubiquitous aspects of human experience and behaviour that have long been considered impervious to scientific investigation. Recently, however, cognitive neuroscience studies have shown an association between RS experiences and neural activity in fronto-parietal regions. Much less is known on whether activity in the above areas is causally involved in modulating RS experiences or just epiphenomenal to them. Here we combined two-pulse (10 Hz) transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with a novel, ad hoc developed RS-related, implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate whether implicit RS representations, although supposedly rather stable, can be modified in the short-term by a virtual lesion of inferior parietal lobe (IPL) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). A self-esteem (SE) IAT, focused on self-concepts non related to RS representations, was developed as control. The results show that inhibiting the IPL induced a specific increase in RS. In contrast, interfering with the left DLPFC induced a marginal increase of difficulty in controlling automatic associations of the self with both RS and SE dimensions. Thus, suppression of neural activity in parietal regions seems causally involved in the specific induction of fast RS increase. Conversely, the DLPFC appears to contribute to RS in relation to attentional processes or activation of self-related concepts.