Psychospiritual Healing from al-Quran: Internal Aesthetic Factor of Quranic Sound and Its Effects in Activating Greater Brain Regions

Abstract

Spiritual healing and Quranic sound therapy has long accompanied human tradition since decades. Quranic sound is perceived as rhythmical cues that portrays psychospiritual effects although it was not recited with external melodic intonation (tarannum). Its internal rhythms were believed to activate and synchronize its listeners’ brain rhythms hence modulating their brainwaves to give the psychospiritual effect. However, there is lack of scientific investigation that elucidates source of Quranic linguistic rhythms which contributes to the greater neural activation in the Quran’s listeners. This study aimed to evaluate a Quranic linguistic feature that contributes to high rhythmicity, and high energy that activates its listeners neural ensembles. As a result, Electroencephalography ()’s electrode correlation will be presented as a predictive measure for neural connectivity compared with Arabic News listening. Fatihah Chapter recitation (tajweed without human speech. Spectrogram analysis was performed by using Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (PRAAT) software. The continuous brain electrical charges from twenty-eight normal subjects (14 male:14 female) with inclusion criteria of habitual daily Quran listeners were recorded by 128-channel EEG. These brain electrical data were pre-processed and analysed by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) followed by multivariate analysis. Discriminant Analysis results which compare the mean values of the groups were followed by Multiple Linear Regression. From spectrogram analysis, we found that Fatihah Chapter sound is more rhythmic compared to Arabic news and brings higher energy. . Comparatively, larger-scale integration of neural ensembles from the fronto-temporo-parieto-occipital areas was observed while listening to Quranic Fatihah Chapter recitation than the fronto-temporo-parieto regions from Arabic News listening, indicated of higher synchronisation and integration in neuronal communication during Quranic listening. Dynamic brain network interaction is postulated in a desynchronised pattern, essential for normal brain functioning, reduced pathological tendencies, and emotion-health-cognition stability, offering psychospiritual effects.