The Neuroscience of Being Human
The Neuroscience of Religious Experience
Temporal lobe activity, Persinger's God Helmet, spontaneous mystical states and what neuroimaging reveals about encounters with the sacred, from Christian visions to Sufi ecstasy, shamanic trance to Buddhist satori, explored without endorsement or dismissal
1,028-word article with 8 Harvard references.
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Religious experience, the felt encounter with something sacred, transcendent, or divine, is one of the most powerful subjective events the human brain can produce. It has been reported across every culture, every century and every tradition. The neuroscience of religious experience does not ask whether God exists. It asks what the brain is doing when a person reports an encounter with the divine. The answer involves the temporal lobes, the default mode network, the serotonergic system, and a capacity for self-transcendence that appears to be wired into human neural architecture. This article examines the evidence from Persinger's controversial God Helmet experiments, Newberg's neuroimaging of mystics, the role of the temporal lobe in spontaneous religious experience, and what the neuroscience reveals about the boundary between pathology and revelation.
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