Neurospirituality: Conceptual Foundations, Clinical Relevance, And Current Evidence

Resumo

Background: Neurospirituality is an emerging interdisciplinary framework integrating neuroscience, neurology, palliative care, and the medical humanities to address the spiritual and existential dimensions of health. Spirituality refers to meaning-making through connectedness beyond the self, whereas religiosity denotes organized beliefs, rituals, and communities.

Objective: To review the conceptual foundations, neuroscientific evidence, and clinical applications of neurospirituality in neurological disorders and palliative care.

Methods: This narrative review synthesizes evidence from neuroscience, cognitive science, neurology, palliative care, and spirituality research to examine the neural correlates, clinical relevance, limitations, and future directions of neurospirituality.

Results: Current evidence associates spiritual experiences with distributed brain networks, particularly the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal control networks, rather than discrete brain regions. These models are heuristic and suggest that domain-general cognitive processes may contribute to spiritual experiences without implying spirituality-specific neural mechanisms. Clinically, greater spiritual well-being is associated with improved coping, resilience, and quality of life, particularly in palliative care and selected neurological disorders. However, the evidence is largely correlational and limited by small samples, heterogeneous definitions, cultural variability, and scarce longitudinal data. Current clinical recommendations therefore rely mainly on expert consensus and person-centered care.

Conclusions: Neurospirituality provides an emerging translational framework linking neuroscience with the spiritual dimensions of health and neurological care. Although existing evidence supports the clinical relevance of spirituality, no universally accepted neurobiological model of spiritual experience exists. Further interdisciplinary, longitudinal, and culturally diverse research is needed to clarify underlying mechanisms and strengthen clinical translation.