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+--- Thread: Research Spirituality can’t be reduced to what’s happening in the brain (/thread-19763.html)
Spirituality can’t be reduced to what’s happening in the brain - C C - Feb 10, 2026
https://psyche.co/ideas/spirituality-cant-be-reduced-to-whats-happening-in-the-brain
EXCERPTS: Researchers increasingly recognise that spirituality is a vital part of human wellbeing, whether or not one identifies as religious. Understanding this dimension of life isn’t just an abstract pursuit; it could help people better harness the benefits of spirituality for their mental and physical health. But where should we look if we want to understand, scientifically, what’s happening in the mind during transcendent spiritual experiences? For many, the answer seems obvious: look at the brain. But, as we’ll see, that answer is incomplete.
It’s true that neuroscience provides remarkable insights into spiritual experiences. It has revealed, for example, how meditation affects neural networks associated with attention and self-awareness, and how these experiences alter the activity of the brain’s default mode network (DMN). It has demonstrated that contemplative practices can literally reshape brain structure over time. I have studied how brain activity changes during spiritual practices like meditation, contemplation, and dhikr – a mantra repetition practice in Islam. These practices share a common characteristic: stillness. They can be studied in a lab and fit well with fMRI scanning, which requires a subject to lie still in an imaging machine.
But, as my research progressed, I encountered the limits of this approach. If you want to study a Shia Muslim mourner performing chest-beating, a whirling dervish dancing in circles, a pilgrim walking for days toward a sacred destination, a practitioner moving through the postures of yoga, or a worshipper bowing and prostrating in the daily salat, many brain-imaging devices become basically useless.
There are other, deeper problems. Brain-imaging studies, despite their contributions, often strip away the cultural and contextual richness that gives mental life its meaning. When researchers isolate variables for the sake of experimental clarity, we risk studying something that is far removed from the phenomenon we hoped to understand. Is meditating in the serene stillness of a monastery really the same as doing it in the cramped, humming confines of an fMRI scanner? Can we truly grasp the mind of a participant in Arbaeen processions – beating their chest in unison with hundreds, immersed in grief and devotion – by observing a lone volunteer rhythmically tapping in a lab, wearing a clunky EEG cap?
Something vital gets lost in translation. Moreover, brain-centred approaches promote a narrow focus on what’s happening in an individual brain, apart from the body and world in which it is embedded. This is the kind of framing that ends up in headlines like ‘This Is Your Brain on God’ or ‘Neuroscience Explains Religious Belief’.
I began to think that perhaps the change I needed wasn’t just technological. Perhaps I needed to rethink what I was even looking for when I said I wanted to understand the spiritual mind.
[...] One important implication of this perspective is that transcendental experiences are no less ‘real’ than ordinary ones. A brain-centred view treats such experiences as products of neural activity, which might lead some to see them as less real, or even illusory. But from an embodied, ecological standpoint, these experiences are not confined to the brain but extend into the lived reality that we share. Just as a trained musician can detect subtle harmonies that others miss, a spiritual practitioner may perceive traces of the divine or the sublime in situations where others might overlook them.
[...] Like a group of radios all tuning into the same frequency, the individuals engaged in prayer aren’t simply generating private, internal experiences. Instead, they are resonating with a shared, embodied and communal rhythm. We can see this kind of resonance in other rituals where people move and feel together, and their rhythms and emotions become intertwined – rituals that appear across various religious and spiritual contexts.
Brain scans alone cannot offer a complete picture of what’s happening here. To truly understand spiritual experiences requires looking at all dimensions of cognition: our actions, our bodies, our tools and objects, our relationships, and the environments we inhabit. Wearable, naturalistic technologies such as heart-rate and electrodermal-activity monitors, GPS trackers, and motion-capturing cameras are likely to give us further insight into spiritual experience as it unfolds in real-world settings.
This shift in perspective doesn’t just help researchers study spirituality, it also makes spirituality more accessible. [...] Yes, the brain plays an important role – but it’s only part of the picture... (MORE - missing details)