Religious and spiritual experiences from a neuroscientific and complex systems perspective.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews October 1, 2025 Peter Jedlicka, Martha Nari Havenith 3 citations
Spiritual and religious practices represent a major cognitive transition in evolution, rooted in complex brain structures, dynamics, and plasticity. This review examines neural mechanisms underlying such experiences, including meditation, prayer, near-death experiences, ecstatic epilepsy, psychedelic states, and spirituality changes after brain lesions. It addresses whether these experiences can be neurobiologically explained, discussing predictive processing theory's suggestion that ecstatic states may involve impaired prediction. The beneficial and therapeutic effects of spiritual routines are placed in evolutionary medicine context. The authors argue that fruitful neurospirituality research avoids both excessive reductionism and dualism, favoring limited reductionism balanced by integrative approaches from dynamical systems, complex systems, and network theory.