everal years ago, Professor John T. Cacioppo was working on a large-scale longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health when he began speaking informally with Barnaby Marsh, the Templeton Foundation’s Director of Venture Philanthropy Strategy and New Programs Development.

Cacioppo, as he recalls it, wanted to go beyond the NIH-mandated emphasis on disease and various pathologies to look at how that data might be leveraged to look at questions of spirituality. The Foundation as it turns out, was all for opening a line of inquiry that the scientific community had long shied away from. So began an ambitious ongoing project, based at Cacioppo’s University of Chicago, with the self-explanatory title, “Expanding Spiritual Knowledge through Science: Chicago Multidisciplinary Research Network for Neuroscientific, Population-Based Studies of Sociality, Spirituality, and Health.”

Cacioppo, Co-Director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, remembers well the origins of his collaboration with the Templeton Foundation: “We were saying ‘Trust us.’ And, they did,” he says.

The three-year project, known as the Network, began in 2005 with a grant of $1.8 million. In the runup to the project’s launch and for several months following, a substantial amount of time was devoted to identifying and recruiting potential members of the Network. Eventually, 22 academics ranging from mathematicians and neuroanatomists to theologians and historians of religion were chosen.

The Network’s leaders were intent on creating a culture where, as Cacioppo puts it, “No one is a star.” To help foster this atmosphere of collegiality, Network members and their families took part in a series of Chicago-area retreats in inspirational settings. By late 2005, work began in earnest with quarterly meetings of the Network and weekly meetings of subgroups of scholars, students and researchers working on specific projects. The result, so far, is the creation of a fecund, adventurous environment for the study of questions never before addressed in such a broad-based way.

“There are a whole series of questions that get raised from a scientific point of view that cause me, as a historian, to take a fresh look,” says W. Clark Gilpin, the Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. “I find myself looking back at the history of theology and asking some new questions...The kind of projects that are emerging for me would go back and look at the tradition in light of these findings.”

“There’s a way that mind and society questions are coming back to the fore for me. I’m learning an awful lot about the parts of the brain and how they function,” chuckles Gilpin, author of the monograph The Letter from Prison: Testimony and Literary Form in Early Modern England, while praising the Network. “We all feel like we are learning some extraordinary things.”

What the Network’s members essentially have done is to open up many lines of inquiry for research. Some prove fruitful. Others don’t. One study sought to examine possible positive links between the effect of spirituality and religiosity on subjects’ metabolic rates. As it turned out, the connection is negative. “If anything, we found that regular churchgoers are more obese,” says Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago’s psychology department. Cacioppo’s racially diverse sample for that finding was 230 people living in Cook County, Illinois between the ages of 50 and 57 studied over a three-year period. It was part of the larger NIH-funded study on the role of sociality on disease processes in older adults.

Another line of Network inquiry that is proving more fruitful is looking at “Loneliness and the invisible threads of social connection,” which posits that humans’ need for social connection arose through evolutionary forces that rewarded the effectiveness of individual specialization that social cooperation made possible. Conversely, people feel pain when deprived of such contact and, most interestingly, turn to God to fill the social vacuum. “It shows how belief in God is protective,” says Cacioppo, who is writing a book that touches on themes of loneliness and spirituality.

Howard Nusbaum, Cacioppo’s Co-Director at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, is working on an examination of the preconscious effects of sociality and spirituality by using the Stroop task. (Simply put, the Stroop task involves subjects reading words that are printed in different color text. How quickly or slowly a subject reads a given word is an indication to researchers of the importance of the word to the subject.)

“The more religious you are, the more open you are to positive religious words than to positive social words with no religious connotation,” says Nusbaum, the Chair of the University of Chicago’s psychology department. “Your worldview changes.”

In the coming months, Nusbaum says he plans to study what contributes to subjects feeling more religious in a spontaneous or “in the moment” manner. Another member of Nusbaum’s team, Hadas Shintel, a post-doctoral member of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, is planning on using brain imaging to better understand feelings of religiosity.

Other Network studies are rooted more in the humanities. Professor Gilpin, for example, is on a team examining the question: Religions as a map for a life worth living: An antidote to terror management in the face of mortality salience? The team’s research, based on historical analyses of religious depictions and beliefs, examines how sprituality allows believers to find meaning in death.

In talking about the Network’s ability—with Templeton funding—to re-examine data from longitudinal studies with narrow foci, Cacioppo speaks with an enthusiasm that borders on glee. “Templeton gave me the opportunity to go back to this data that we had been collecting and use it to get a bigger picture,” he says.

Beyond the work of the Network itself, Cacioppo hopes the Network will come to serve as a future model for cooperation across disciplines on questions of spirituality. In underscoring the novelty of this approach, Cacioppo quotes Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing of Wu Li Masters: “Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.”

Cacioppo himself writes about the potential dividends of bridging the gap: “These differences in how members of a multidisciplinary research team think about evidence can lead to conflict and confusion or they can lead to richer interactions in which assumptions and interpretations are challenged constructively en route to the discovery of deeper, more comprehensive truths. It is the opportunity to achieve this deeper, more comprehensive understanding of spirituality, nature and health that makes it worth the time and effort on the part of the scientists and scholars to develop the common language and inclusive ways of thinking about a wide range of evidence.”

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