What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences?

ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Lynne Blumberg

A devotee in a state of trance is calmed by volunteers at a Buddhist temple in
Nakhon Pathom Province, Thailand. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

“Everyone philosophizes,” writes neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg in his latest book, The Metaphysical Mind: Probing the Biology of Philosophical Thought. Since everyday and spiritual concerns are variations of the same thinking processes, Newberg thinks it’s essential to examine how people experience spirituality in order to fully understand how their brains work. Newberg is a pioneer in the field of neurotheology, the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences. Newberg suggests in his new book that mystical experiences are described as blissful or ecstatic because they share many of the same neural pathways in the parietal and frontal lobes that are involved in sexual arousal. To take his scans, Newburg uses functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), and single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) imaging. [link]

Image shows how when practitioners surrender their will, such as when they speak in tongues or function as a medium, activity decreases in their frontal lobes and increases in their thalamus, the tiny brain structure that regulates the flow of incoming sensory information to many parts of the brain.