'The Spiritual Mind': The Neuroscience of Spiritual Experience

Neuroscientific evidence reveals that spiritual exercises can precipitate connective and transformative experiences. This article highlights the neuroscientific data which reveal that spiritual experiences are associated with the manifestation of specific brain activities in the hippocampus and amygdala. These experiences usually occur during meditation or prayer, and are characterised by feelings of well-being, connection, and temporal and spatial distortion. Meditation has also been linked with brain wave synchrony and is suspected to confer permanent changes upon long-term practitioners. Although underdeveloped, the neuroscientific evidence suggests that spiritual experience is mired exclusively in identifiable brain activity. However, although well-equipped to reveal the physiological conditions associated with spiritual experience, neuroscience is silent on the psychological meaning and impact of such events.