Mystical Experiences: The Neurological Underpinnings

What happens inside the human brain when someone encounters what feels like an infinite divine presence – something so utterly unlike anything in ordinary life that language itself fails? These are not hypothetical questions. They describe experiences reported by mystics, meditators, and spiritual seekers across every culture and century. Today, a field called neurotheology – the scientific study of the relationship between brain function and religious experience – is beginning to map what is happening neurologically when people cross the threshold from ordinary consciousness into the transcendent. At the center of this inquiry are two profound concepts: Rudolf Otto’s “Wholly Other” and Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg’s “Absolute Unitary Being.”

Two concepts, one profound territory 🔗

To understand what neurotheology is actually studying, it helps to first understand the philosophical concepts it is trying to explain. They describe two distinct but related types of mystical experience – and together, they cover most of the territory that people across religious traditions have called “the sacred.”

Rudolf Otto and the “Wholly Other” 🔗

In his landmark 1917 work The Idea of the Holy, German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto argued that the core of all religious experience is an encounter with something he called the numinous – from the Latin numen, meaning divine spirit. Otto described this as a feeling of confronting something radically, incomprehensibly other than the self. He gave it the German phrase ganz Andere, meaning the “Wholly Other.” As Otto explained, the numinous presents itself as “a condition absolutely sui generis and incomparable whereby the human being finds himself utterly abashed.”

Otto captured this encounter in another famous Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans – a mystery before which one simultaneously trembles and is drawn in. As mysterium, the numinous is “wholly other” – entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. Yet it also fascinates, attracting rather than repelling. The experience of Moses before the burning bush, Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, or a mystic’s sudden sense of overpowering divine presence – these are the kinds of encounters Otto had in mind.

Crucially, Otto insisted the numinous is non-rational. It cannot be reached by logic or argument. We “know” the holy through feeling it, intuitively rather than cognitively or intellectually. This is not irrationalism; it simply means there is a dimension of human experience that surpasses the categories of reason entirely. Otto’s ideas went on to influence Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, C.S. Lewis, and a long lineage of philosophers and theologians who took seriously the claim that encounter with the sacred is its own irreducible category of experience.

Absolute Unitary Being: the neuroscience of oneness 🔗

While Otto described the experience of encountering something radically other, the concept of Absolute Unitary Being (AUB) – developed by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and psychiatrist Eugene d’Aquili – describes the opposite pole of mystical experience: the total dissolution of the boundary between self and everything else. AUB refers to the rare state in which there is a complete loss of the sense of self, loss of the sense of space and time, and everything becomes an infinite, undifferentiated oneness.

AUB, Newberg notes, is what mystics across traditions call union with God, realization of Brahman, or the experience of sunyata (emptiness) in Buddhism. Newberg calls this state – which is similar in all different faiths and cultures – the state of Absolute Unitary Being: a state in which the subject loses all awareness of discrete limited being and of the passage of time, and even experiences an obliteration of the self-other dichotomy. It is not merely a pleasant feeling of harmony; those who have undergone it consistently report it as the most real experience of their lives, more vivid and certain than ordinary waking consciousness.

Together, the Wholly Other and AUB map the two poles of mystical experience. In one, the sacred confronts you as something infinitely greater and utterly unlike yourself. In the other, the distinction between you and the sacred collapses entirely. Both are part of what neurotheology now investigates with brain imaging tools.

What the brain actually does during mystical states 🔗

Neurotheology moves these concepts from theology into the laboratory. The pioneering research of Andrew Newberg, using a brain imaging technique called SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography), has produced some of the most detailed pictures of the meditating brain available to science. His studies involved Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Franciscan nuns in deep prayer, and Sikh chanters – diverse traditions, but with remarkably consistent neurological signatures.

The parietal lobe and the loss of self 🔗

The most consistent finding across these studies involves the parietal lobe – specifically the posterior superior parietal lobe, which Newberg calls the Orientation Association Area (OAA). This area of the brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our orientation in space and time. Newberg hypothesizes that blocking all sensory and cognitive input into this area during meditation is associated with the sense of no space and no time that is so often described in meditation.

In ordinary waking life, the OAA never rests. It is constantly processing sensory information to define where your body ends and the world begins. SPECT images taken at the peak of meditation revealed a decrease in the activity in the OAA – confirming a neurological state consistent with the experiences described by the participants. One loses the boundaries that define the self, so a feeling of union with all things makes sense. This finding has since been replicated and extended in fMRI studies confirming that parietal lobe activity decreases consistently during meditation practices associated with self-transcendence.

When the OAA goes quiet, the brain loses its ability to draw the line between “I” and “everything else.” The result, neurologically speaking, is exactly what mystics describe: a dissolution of the self into something boundless. For Buddhist meditators, this is the experience of no-self merging with all phenomena. For the Franciscan nuns in Newberg’s studies, it felt like closeness to God – a sense of union with a presence larger than themselves. Different interpretations, but the same core neurological event.

The frontal lobe and focused attention 🔗

While the parietal lobe grows quiet, the frontal lobe becomes markedly more active during meditation. The front part of the brain, which is usually involved in focusing attention and concentration, is more active during meditation, which makes sense since meditation requires a high degree of concentration. The more activity increased in the frontal lobe, the more activity decreased in the parietal lobe.

This inverse relationship is significant. The intense, single-pointed attention cultivated in meditation – on a breath, a mantra, or a visualization – drives frontal activity upward. The frontal lobe’s increasing dominance appears to suppress the OAA’s normal input, progressively quieting the brain’s sense of self-boundary. The result is a neurological feedback loop: the deeper the concentration, the quieter the sense of a separate self, and the more available the brain becomes to the experience of unity. Long-term practitioners reflect this structurally: individuals who practice prayer and meditation over many years have been found to have thicker and more active frontal lobes than non-practitioners.

The temporal lobe, limbic system, and the sense of presence 🔗

The experience of the Wholly Other – that overwhelming sense of a sacred, powerful presence – appears to involve different neural architecture. The temporal lobes are clearly important in religious and spiritual experiences. The amygdala and hippocampus have been shown to be particularly involved in the experience of visions, profound experiences, memory, and meditation.

The temporal lobes process emotional memory and the sense of familiarity or significance – what neuroscientists call “salience.” When these areas become unusually active, experiences can take on a quality of overwhelming meaningfulness and the sense that something unseen but powerfully real is present. This maps directly onto Otto’s description of the numinous: the creature-feeling of being finite before something infinite, the trembling awe before an incomprehensible presence.

One of the most prominent examples of spiritual experiences being caused observably by a brain pathology is ecstatic epilepsy – focal epileptic seizures accompanied by ecstatic auras with feelings of happiness. The novelist Dostoevsky famously reported such states during his epilepsy, and they are associated with temporal lobe activity. While this doesn’t reduce mystical experience to pathology, it does confirm that these brain regions are directly involved in generating the phenomenological signature of sacred encounter.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that meditation results in an activation of the prefrontal cortex, activation of the thalamus and the inhibitory thalamic reticular nucleus, and a resultant functional deafferentation of the parietal lobe. This sequence – frontal cortex activation, thalamic gating, and parietal suppression – appears to be the neurological mechanism by which intense meditation generates the conditions for AUB.

The neurotransmitter dimension 🔗

Brain regions alone don’t tell the whole story. Mystical states also involve significant shifts in the brain’s chemical environment. The neurochemical changes as a result of meditative practices involve all the major neurotransmitter systems. These changes contribute to the amelioration of anxiety and depressive symptomatology.

Serotonin is particularly important. Many psychedelic substances that reliably produce mystical-type experiences work primarily through serotonin receptors – suggesting that serotonin is centrally involved in the felt quality of transcendence. Dopamine, meanwhile, appears to contribute to the intensely rewarding and meaningful character of these states. A PET study on dopaminergic tone in Yoga Nidra using 11C-raclopride showed a significant increase of dopamine during meditation – helping explain why AUB is so often described as the most profoundly meaningful and satisfying experience of a person’s life.

Does science reduce mysticism – or deepen it? 🔗

A natural concern is whether mapping the neural correlates of mystical experience explains it away. If AUB is “just” decreased parietal activity, is it still real? Newberg addresses this directly. Our experience of baseline reality – chairs, tables, love, hate – can also be reduced to neural blips and fluxes of brain chemistry. One can never get at what is “really out there” without its being processed, one way or another, through the brain. If we don’t dismiss love or beauty as “merely neurological,” the same courtesy should apply to mystical experience.

The interpretive diversity that surrounds these experiences further complicates any reductive reading. A Hindu practitioner encountering AUB may understand it as union with Brahman. A Christian mystic undergoing the same neurological state may describe closeness to God. A Buddhist may speak of emptiness. Even though the individual content differs culturally, we can speak of specific processes in the brain that are the same in their characteristics. The neurology is universal; the meaning is culturally and personally situated.

Ultimately, neurotheology is not just a scientific analysis of religion, nor is it just a religious analysis of science; it is both. It does not decide whether the Wholly Other is real or whether AUB is genuine contact with the divine. What it does show is that these experiences are neurologically real, neurologically consistent, and neurologically meaningful – not fabrications of dysfunctional brains, but the products of a neural architecture that may have evolved, at least in part, to make transcendence possible.

What do you think? If the experience of the “Wholly Other” and “Absolute Unitary Being” have identifiable neurological signatures, does that change how you understand the truth-claims of mystical traditions – or does the presence of a brain mechanism simply tell us how the sacred is encountered, not whether it exists? And given that people from radically different cultures consistently report these experiences despite the differences in interpretation, what does this universality suggest about the relationship between consciousness and transcendence?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3968360/
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Otto
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous
4. https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/Otto.htm
5. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2025/05/24/otto/
6. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/newberg.html
7. https://mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/10/1003/html
8. http://www.andrewnewberg.com/research/
9. http://www.andrewnewberg.com/spect-images
10. https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/belief-and-the-brain-part-2-the-neurology-of-transcendence
11. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925492710003227
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13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190564/
14. https://biologos.org/articles/neurotheology-making-sense-of-the-brain-and-religious-experiences