Religious and spiritual experiences from a neuroscientific and complex systems perspective.
Peter Jedlicka, Martha Nari Havenith
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews October 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106319 via PubMed
Summary
The review discusses how spiritual and religious practices reflect significant cognitive evolution in organisms, emphasizing their connection to complex brain structures and dynamics. It explores the neural mechanisms behind these experiences, including meditation, prayer, near-death experiences, and ecstatic epilepsy. The authors argue for a balanced approach in 'neurospirituality' research that avoids excessive reductionism while considering integrative theories. They also highlight the therapeutic benefits of spiritual practices within an evolutionary medicine context.
Study at a glance
| Design | review |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Spiritual and religious experiences are linked to evolved brain structures and can be understood through both neuroscience and integrative approaches. |
Abstract
The emergence of spiritual and religious practices can be seen as a major cognitive transition in the evolution of biological organisms. Spiritual and religious experiences are closely linked to evolved complex brain structures, as well as their dynamics and plasticity. In this review, we will focus on the neural mechanisms that make such experiences possible. We will also address the methodological, neurophilosophical and neurotheological questions concerning the extent to which religious and spiritual experiences can be neurobiologically explained. We will summarise the rapidly expanding knowledge about the neuroscience of meditation and prayer, near-death experiences, ecstatic epilepsy, psychedelic experiences, and changes in spirituality associated with brain lesions. Additionally, we will discuss the validity of suggestions, based on predictive processing theory, that ecstatic states may represent a pathology of the mind and brain in the form of impaired prediction. Finally, we will describe the beneficial and therapeutic effects of spiritual and religious routines and practices and put them in the context of evolutionary medicine. Overall, we will argue that 'neurospirituality' research can be fruitful if it avoids both excessive reductionism as well as dualism. Instead, it should be based on limited reductionism, balanced by more integrative, non-localisationist approaches, including dynamical systems, complex systems and network theory.