Monitoring the neural activity associated with praying in Sahaja Yoga Meditation

Abstract Sahaja Yoga Meditation draws on many religious traditions and uses a variety of techniques including Christian prayer to reach a state known as thoughtless awareness, or mental silence. Based on previous evidence that Christian prayer activates areas associated with social cognition, e.g., medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction and precuneus, we hypothesized that praying in Sahaja Yoga Meditation would recruit a similar pattern of activity. Sixteen experienced Sahaja Yoga Meditation practitioners were scanned using task based functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging while performing formalized and improvised forms of praying, associated with the achievement of the meditative state of mental silence, and their equivalent secular tasks. Our results showed the deactivation of bilateral thalamus during both prayers compared to secular conditions and the activation in the medial prefrontal cortex that was reduced by religious and formalized secular speech conditions but increased during improvised secular speech. This suggests that the perception of the surroundings mediated by the thalamus is unemployed during these prayers probably due to the inner concentration established and that improvised speech affects the medial prefrontal cortex differently depending if it is used in religious or secular conditions, which does not happen with formalized speech and may be related to the effects of meditation on psychiatric disorders. Our findings suggest that praying by Sahaja Yoga Meditation practitioners is neurophenomenologically different from the social cognitive attempt of praying within Christian praying practices.