Cerebral Cortex
May 14, 2018
Lisa Miller, Iris M. Balodis, Clayton H. Mcclintock et al.
65 citations
People across cultures and throughout history report spiritual experiences that involve a sense of union transcending the ordinary self, but their neural mechanisms are poorly understood. Using an individualized guided-imagery task, the authors compared brain activity during personally meaningful spiritual experiences with that during stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. During spiritual experiences, the left inferior parietal lobule showed reduced activity compared to neutral-relaxing experiences, suggesting this region contributes to perceptual processing and self-other representations. Compared to stress cues, spiritual cues reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions linked to sensory and emotional processing. The findings point to neural mechanisms underlying broadly defined, personally experienced spirituality.
Behavioral Sciences
February 23, 2026
Joshua Lipson, Hannes Kettner, Robin Carhart-Harris et al.
Mood before taking a psychedelic substance and factors like social connectedness, mindfulness, and spirituality influence how the experience unfolds. People with higher baseline depression and anxiety tend to have more challenging experiences but not more mystical ones, while those with greater wellbeing report more mystical and fewer challenging experiences. Mindfulness and spirituality are linked to more mystical experiences, and social connectedness and mindfulness are linked to fewer challenging ones. Mystical and challenging experiences were weakly but positively correlated overall.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
October 1, 2011
Lisa Miller, Kenneth Miller, John Haught et al.
A panel of an evolutionary biologist and two theologians discusses questions about immortality, the existence of the soul beyond the body, and scientific evidence for mystical experience, drawing on cultural, historical, and scientific perspectives. The conversation, moderated by a journalist, took place at the New York Academy of Sciences and is presented as an edited transcript.