Neurotheology And The Search For Mystical Switches – Analysis
By Sooraj S and Nikhil Seethi
Historically, humans have had a unique propensity to contemplate other-worldly phenomena, often experiencing intense emotions of awe and reverence to a ‘higher power’. The perennial question, ‘Did God create man, or did man create God?’, has fueled endless debates, particularly between theists and atheists, which have not yielded any consensus or even useful approximations to an answer. Also, many individuals have identified themselves as being ‘spiritual’ without aligning strictly with either camp, valuing their subjective, personal experiences of spirituality as meaningful truths irrespective of their objective verifiability or conformity to theological dogmas.
The emergence of a ‘secular’ valorization of spirituality invites cognitive sciences into a compelling field of inquiry. What if modern scientific knowledge, mediated by the latest technology, can give an explanatory account of spiritual experiences and maybe even induce it? Neurotheology attempts to tackle this and explain the biological and neural underpinnings of spiritual or religious experiences such as revelation, mystical awakenings or a perceived sense of dissolution of spatio-temporal boundaries, associated with practices such as prayers, meditation and so on. While not its sole focus, a significant aim within the research program of neurotheology is to identify specific brain regions or neural structures, sometimes referred to as the ‘God spots’, that correlate with spiritual experiences. By doing so, researchers hope to understand what generates these profound experiential states in humans and bring its benefits to those who are typically deprived of such unique experiences. Neurotheology is still a nascent research field, but it promises a lot, while not being immune from philosophical scrutiny and criticism.
So, can neuroscience really find these mystical switches in the human brain and flip them at will to invoke mystical experiences? Some scientists claimed to have done this, unencumbered by appeals to supernaturalistic explanations. For example, Michael A Persinger had conducted a series of experiments by fashioning a device (the famous ‘God Helmet’) that generated weak electromagnetic forces that focused on the temporal lobe and reportedly induced mystical experiences in many subjects. Persinger even argued, in his book ‘Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs’ (Persinger, 1987) that the exalted figures in religious history likely suffered from something akin to a temporal lobe epilepsy. The idea was that these neuronal anomalies, combined with narratives defined by cultural norms and socio-psychological conditioning, lead to what we describe as spiritual or mystical experiences.
Subsequent studies, notably by a group of Swedish scientists, were carried out to replicate Persinger’s findings but failed to obtain the same results, leading to the idea that there is no privileged locus of brain region or structure that is uniquely responsible for mystical experiences (Biello, 2007). It became gradually clear that such experiences were correlated with activations in multiple regions of the brain, each unique to the subject and the experiences they have. While patterns do emerge, the differences that stand out might pose an impediment to deriving causal explanations, viz.in developing a solid framework that can rigorously specify how and under what exact brain or neuronal conditions would unique mystical experiences obtain and why they do not obtain under different brain states. This difficulty leaves much to substantiation dependent on anecdotal evidence or subjective reports of mystical experiences by individuals.
Rethinking and expanding the framework
If neurotheology marks a provocative entry into the scientific study of spiritual experience, it also invites a deeper reckoning with the diverse landscapes where such experiences emerge. Early Western studies, such as Andrew Newberg’s SPECT imaging of Tibetan monks or Mario Beauregard’s fMRI scans of Carmelite nuns (Beauregard and Paquette, 2006), pursued the hypothesis that altered states of consciousness were traceable to activity (or inactivity) in specific neural circuits. These findings often implicated the parietal lobes, limbic structures, and prefrontal regions in the generation of such states, advancing the notion of a distributed ‘neural correlates of the sacred’. Yet these neural insights, while profound, remain tethered to particular cultural and theological imaginaries. To expand the search for mystical switches beyond reductionist or universalist assumptions, it is crucial to situate neurotheology in relation to the plurality of world-views that inform the noetic qualities of mystical experiences (to borrow William James’ terminology).
In India, spiritual practices such as yogic breathing, mantra recitation, and ritual worship are not merely abstract expressions of belief, but ways of inhabiting and modulating awareness through the body. Unlike doctrinal faiths, these practices often function outside rigid theological frameworks, emphasizing lived, repeated experience over propositional truth. Empirical studies from institutions in India (Rao et al., 2018; Saini et al., 2024) have reported correlations between these practices and enhanced parasympathetic tone, emotional regulation, and even cortical reorganization. Yet their significance cannot be exhausted through biomedical outcomes alone. These traditions are anchored in a worldview where consciousness is not strictly brain-bound but is distributed—relational, atmospheric, and in many formulations, sacred. They propose a model in which cognition and divinity are not opposites but entwined states of being. As such, these frameworks not only complicate the reductionist impulses of contemporary neuroscience but also gesture toward a different epistemic orientation, one where experience is not bracketed for the sake of objectivity, but treated as a site of knowledge in its own right.
Across the Amazonian regions of Latin America, neuroscientific studies of Ayahuasca ceremonies (Ruffell et al., 2021) conducted in collaboration with indigenous knowledge-keepers, have shown activation in brain networks related to memory consolidation, emotional insight, and spiritual self-repair. But these findings are incomplete without the ontological frameworks within which these ceremonies are practiced, which are collective, ancestral, and reparative in the aftermath of colonial trauma. Similarly, trance states in West African ritual healing traditions, long pathologized under colonial psychiatry, are now being reassessed as adaptive and neuropsychologically significant states, allowing for communal cohesion, trauma integration, and reconstitution of identity.
Thus, while neurotheology began as a search for discrete ‘God spots’, the field has gradually welcomed a more nuanced recognition that mystical experience is not merely switched on in the brain but emerges from the confluence of neural possibility, cultural encoding, and existential need. Rather than seek a universal mechanism, a more constructive trajectory lies in honoring epistemic multiplicity, namely, acknowledging how postcolonial, indigenous, and non-Western traditions offer not just data but also theoretical contributions to understanding the sacred. In this view, neurotheology is less a final answer and more a meeting ground between indigenous knowledge systems and the empirical rigor of modern science. The promise of neurotheology, then, lies not in mechanizing transcendence, but in drawing maps across varied terrains of human experience, maps that are as much spiritual as they are neural, as much postcolonial as they are scientific.
Philosophical problems and human limitations
While neurotheology shows promise in expanding our understanding of spiritual experiences through more refined imaging techniques and interdisciplinary methods, it inevitably confronts philosophical constraints. The field often claims to uphold methodological rigor and epistemological plurality by integrating insights from different spiritual traditions as well as disciplinary areas like anthropology and psychology. One might even encounter claims that neurotheology avoids ontological reductionism by focusing only on methodological reductionism which does not reify conceptual and linguistic tools and gives weight to the reality of emergent phenomena like conscious experiences. Yet even in its modesty, it cannot evade the deep philosophical issues it brushes against, most notably, the mind-body problem and the conditions for the possibility of knowledge itself.
A lot of scientists as well as non-experts, who are typically physicalists, believe that continued advances in neuroscience will eventually solve the problem of consciousness, much like a complex protein puzzle. Many physicists invoke the example of the discovery of DNA structure that displaced many of the assumptions held by vitalism, in order to discredit the mystery surrounding the problem of consciousness. It is implied therein that the discovery of more complex brain structures and its functions will eventually demystify the problem of consciousness and dispel the ‘pseudoscientific’ claims about the ‘strong-emergence’ or ‘fundamentality’ of consciousness. But this confidence stems from a philosophical misunderstanding of the mind-body problem and also rests on a category error, confusing correlation with explanation, and neural activation with experiential meaning.
The philosophical problem of consciousness isn’t just a question of identifying which regions light up on an fMRI during meditation or other unique subjective experiences. It’s a conceptual riddle about how subjective experience (or qualia) emerges from, or accompanies, physical processes in the brain. No amount of neuroimaging currently explains why a certain brain state should give rise to any particular subjective feeling, of seeing the color red or tasting mint or falling in love, let alone the sensation of divine union or self-transcendence. Nor does it even begin to address how such an experience carries enduring existential meaning for the person who undergoes it. Therefore, the problem of consciousness (or the aspect of what it is like to be an organism, as Thomas Nagel framed it) is, whether physicalists like it or not, indeed a hard one (as David Chalmers has been rightly arguing) or maybe even an irresolvable one, which is sometimes pejoratively identified as a position of mysterianism.
The more significant approach would be then to develop a speculative, albeit empirically justified, framework to explore why certain philosophical questions are, or at least seem to be, fundamentally beyond the scope of human understanding. Only an understanding of inherent limitations, if any (as scientists now often abhor such philosophical legislations about any limits), of human cognition can shed some light on why mystical experiences are possible and why they may even appear to be wired into our very essence.
An investigation into the subjective reports of mystical experiences and its neural correlates may not yield results that can guarantee replicability or instrumental benefits. After all, expecting a consensus on the exact definition of mystical experiences or God or faith is precisely the fallacious move to externalize the deeply personal, to objectify the subjective and quantify the qualitative. Despite the materialists’ irritation towards such arguments of ‘ineffability’, it is trivially obvious that the human mind engages with realities inaccessible to its cognitive domain through a language without precision, measure or scale. It is instructive to remember Louis Armstrong’s words in this context: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know”.
Conclusion
Perhaps, then, the search for mystical switches is less about isolating neural triggers and more about learning how to ask differently: What does it mean to have faith? What is it that shapes the sacred? and why do certain sounds, rituals, and memories insist on persisting in the cracks of our lives? The recent movie Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, suggests an intriguing view of transcendence that lies not in clarity but contradiction; in grief-stricken blues that mourns as it uplifts. Could neurotheology, then, reframe its inquiry, not as a quest to universalize the divine, but as an invitation to bear witness to how spiritual experience is woven through plural, polyvalent threads? And might it, by listening attentively to traditions that treat consciousness as an unfolding journey, redraw our maps of the sacred from excavation to encounter? These are not conclusions, but openings…fragments of curiosity that beckon us back toward the places where science, song, and the ineffable meet. Just as Coogler’s film’s blues-infused soul reminds us, “Everyone knows that the Blues can be both sad and happy”. Maybe faith too is, much more than being a crutch or a coping mechanism, a shadowy companion that refuses to disappear through ruins and celebrations alike.
Sooraj S is a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University and a Visiting Artist at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research.
