Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T05:05:23.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Deficits in the automatic activation of religious concepts in patients with Parkinson’s disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2009

PAUL M. BUTLER ,
PATRICK MCNAMARA  and
RAYMON DURSO
PAUL M. BUTLER*
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
PATRICK MCNAMARA
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
RAYMON DURSO
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
*
*Correspondence and reprint requests to: Paul M. Butler, Boston University School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, 72 East Concord Street, Robinson Building, 5th Floor, Room 528, Boston, MA 02118. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Religion is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. To probe processing dynamics of religious cognition and its potential brain correlates, we used a novel priming procedure to assess the integrity of religious and control semantic networks in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and controls. Priming for control, but not religious, concepts was intact in PD patients. Patients with left-onset (right-forebrain disease) evidenced severe impairment activating religious concepts. We next modeled the priming performance with modified cable equations. These analyses suggested that deficient performance of PD patients on activation of religious concepts was due to a change in the time constants governing gain and rate of decay of activation in these semantic networks. These modeling results are consistent with dopaminergic dysfunction in right-sided striatal-prefrontal networks. We conclude that right striatal-prefrontal dopaminergic networks support activation of complex religious concepts but not equally complex and related control concepts. (JINS, 2010, 16, 252–261.)

Keywords

Semantic memoryNeurodegenerative disordersReligionGain/decay hypothesisFrontal lobesDopamine
Type
Research Articles
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 252 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The International Neuropsychological Society 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Angwin, A.J., Chenery, H.J., Copland, D.A., Arnott, W.L., Grattan, R., Murdoch, B.E., et al. (2006). Priming of semantic features in Parkinson’s disease. Brain and Language, 99, 218–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arbib, M.A. (2002). Semantic networks. In Arbib, M.A. (Ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (2nd ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnott, W.L., Chenery, H.J., Murdoch, B.E., & Silburn, P.A. (2001). Semantic priming in Parkinson’s disease: Evidence for delayed spreading activation. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 23, 502–519.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Asanuma, K., Tang, C., Ma, Y., Dhawan, V., Mattis, P., Edwards, C., et al. (2006). Network modulation in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Brain, 129(Pt 10), 2667–2678.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Azari, N.P., Nickel, J., Wunderlich, G., Niedeggen, M., Hefter, H., Tellmann, L., et al. (2001). Neural correlates of religious experience. European Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 1649–1652.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beauregard, M., & Paquette, V. (2006). Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Neuroscience Letters, 405, 186–190.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boulenger, V., Mechtouff, L., Thobois, S., Broussolle, E., Jeannerod, M., & Nazir, T.A. (2008). Word processing in Parkinson’s disease is impaired for action verbs but not for concrete nouns. Neuropsychologia, 46, 743–756.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33, 497–505.Google Scholar
Colzato, L.S., van den Wildenberg, W.P., & Hommel, B. (2008). Losing the big picture: How religion may control visual attention. PloS ONE, 3, e3679.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Copland, D.A., McMahon, K.L., Silburn, P.A., & de Zubicaray, G.I. (2009). Dopaminergic Neuromodulation of semantic processing: A 4-t fMRI study with Levodopa. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 2651–2658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
d’Aquila, E., & Newberg, A. (1999). The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.Google Scholar
Dauer, W., & Przedborski, S. (2003). Parkinson’s disease: Mechanisms and models. Neuron, 39, 889–909.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Devinsky, O., & Lai, G. (2008). Spirituality and religion in epilepsy. Epilepsy & Behavior, 12, 636–643.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Francis, P.T., & Perry, E.K. (2007). Cholinergic and other neurotransmitter mechanisms in Parkinson’s disease, Parkinson’s disease dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies. Movement Disorders, 22(Suppl. 17), S351–S357.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Geschwind, N. (1983). Interictal behavioral changes in epilepsy. Epilepsia, 24(Suppl. 1), S23–S30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gorsuch, R.L., & McPherson, S.E. (1989). Intrinsic/extrinsic measurement I/E Revised and single item scales. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 348–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, D.E., Meador, K.G., & Koenig, H.G. (2008). Measuring religiousness in health research: Review and critique. Journal of Religious Health, 47, 134–163.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Han, S., Mao, L., Gu, X., Zhu, Y., Ge, J., & Ma, Y. (2008). Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing. Social Neuroscience, 3, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hornykiewicz, O., & Kish, S.J. (1987). Biochemical pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease. In Yahr, M. & Bergmann, K.J. (Eds.) Parkinson’s Disease (pp. 19–34), New York: Raven Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Huang, H.S., Matevossian, A., Whittle, C., Kim, S.Y., Schumacher, A., Baker, S., et al. (2007). Prefrontal dysfunction in schizophrenia involves mixed-lineage leukemia 1-regulated histone methylation at GABAergic gene promoters. Neurobiology of Disease, 27, 11254–11262.Google ScholarPubMed
Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J.B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural markers of religious conviction. Psychological Science, 20, 385–392.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A.K., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 106, 4876–4881.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koenig, H.K., McCullough, M.E., & Larson, D.B. (2001). Handbook of Religion and Health. New York: Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovibond, P.F., & Lovibond, S.H. (1995). The structure of negative emotional states: Comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 33, 335–343.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McNamara, P. (2001). Religion and the frontal lobes. In Andresen, J. (Ed.), Religion in Mind (pp. 237–256). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNamara, P. (2009). The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNamara, P., Andresen, J., & Gellard, J. (2003). Religion of religiosity and scores on fluency tests to subjective reports of health in older individuals. International Journal of the Psychology of Religion, 13, 259–271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNamara, P., Durso, R., & Brown, A. (2006). Religiosity in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 2, 341–348.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mengelberg, A., & Siegert, R.J. (2003). Is theory-of-mind impaired in Parkinson’s disease? Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 8, 191–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milberg, W., McGlinchey-Berroth, R., Duncan, K.M., & Higgin, J.A. (1999). Alterations in the dynamics of semantic activation in Alzheimer’s disease: Evidence for the gain/decay hypothesis of a disorder of semantic memory. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 5, 641–658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neely, J.H. (1991). Semantic priming effects in visual word recognition: A selection review of current findings and theories. In Besner, D. & Humphreys, G.W. (Eds.), Basic Processes in Reading: Visual Word Recognition (pp. 264–336). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Newberg, A., Pourdehnad, M., Alavi, A., & d’Aquili, E. (2003). Cerebral blood flow during meditative prayer: Preliminary findings and methodological issues. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97, 625–630.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pew Research Forum (2008). U.S. religious landscape survey. Retrieved from http://religions.perforum.org/.Google Scholar
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 4, 515–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rall, W., & Agmon-Snir, H. (1998). Cable theory for dendritic neurons. In Koch, C. & Segev, I. (Eds.), Methods in Neuronal Modeling: From Ions to Networks (2nd ed., pp. 27–93). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, V.S., Hirstein, W.S., Armel, K.C., Tecoma, E., & Iragui, V. (1997). The Neural Basis of Religious Experience. 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. New Orleans, LA., 25-30 October 1997. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 23, 519.1.Google Scholar
Saltzman, J., Strauss, E., Hunter, M., & Archibald, S. (2000). Theory of mind and executive functions in normal aging and Parkinson’s disease. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 6, 781–788.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saver, J.L., & Rabin, J. (1997). The neural substrates of religious experience. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 9, 498–510.Google ScholarPubMed
Schjødt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz, A.W., & Roepstorff, A. (2008). Rewarding prayers. Neuroscience Letters, 443, 165–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Toga, A.W., & Thompson, P.M. (2003). Mapping brain asymmetry. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 37–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wenger, J. (2004). The automatic activation of religious concepts: Implications for religious orientations. International Journal of the Psychology of Religion, 14:109–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams-Gray, C.H., Foltynie, T., Brayne, C.E.G., Robbins, T.W., & Barker, R.A. (2007). Evolution of cognitive dysfunction in an incident Parkinson’s disease cohort. Brain, 30, 1787–1798.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winner, E., Brownell, H., Happé, F., Blum, A., & Pincus, D. (1998). Distinguishing lies from jokes: Theory of mind deficits and discourse interpretation in right hemisphere brain-damaged patients. Brain and Language, 62, 89–106.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed