The Science of Mystical Experience: When the Brain Touches the Infinite

The Experience That Changes Everything

There is an experience that defies language yet has been described — haltingly, inadequately, but consistently — across every culture, every century, every religious tradition and none. A moment in which the boundaries of the self dissolve. A knowing, immediate and total, that everything is connected, that separation is illusion, that what we call “I” is a wave in an infinite ocean. This experience lasts seconds or hours, arrives uninvited or through decades of practice, and those who undergo it consistently report that it is the most meaningful event of their lives.

Mystics have always known this territory. Now science is mapping it — not to explain it away, but to understand what happens in the brain and body when a human being touches the infinite.

William James: The Foundation

William James (1842-1910), Harvard philosopher and psychologist, delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-1902, later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience — a work that remains the foundational text in the scientific study of mysticism over a century later.

James approached mystical experience as a pragmatist and an empiricist. He did not ask whether mystical experiences were “real” in a metaphysical sense. He asked: what are their characteristics, and what effects do they produce in the lives of those who have them?

He identified four defining marks:

1. Ineffability: The experience defies adequate expression in words. Those who have it insist that its full content cannot be communicated — it must be directly experienced. “No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists,” James wrote.

2. Noetic Quality: Despite being ineffable, the experience carries a profound sense of knowing — of having gained insight into truths inaccessible to the discursive intellect. These are not vague impressions but convictions of illumination, insight, and significance that feel more real than ordinary perception.

3. Transiency: Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. They typically last from a few seconds to perhaps half an hour, rarely more. But their effects persist — the memory and its significance remain vivid for years or a lifetime.

4. Passivity: Although mystical states can be facilitated by certain practices (meditation, prayer, fasting, ritual), the experience itself has a quality of being received rather than produced. The mystic feels grasped by a superior power. Volition is in abeyance.

James’s contribution was to take these experiences seriously as data — as facts of human psychology that demanded explanation regardless of one’s theological commitments. He established the framework that every subsequent researcher has built upon.

Abraham Maslow: Peak Experiences and Self-Transcendence

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), the humanistic psychologist best known for his hierarchy of needs, became deeply interested in what he called “peak experiences” — moments of highest happiness, rapture, and fulfillment that share features with classical mystical states.

In Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (1964), Maslow argued that peak experiences are not supernatural events restricted to religious saints. They are natural human capacities that occur during moments of intense love, creative inspiration, aesthetic appreciation, athletic performance, nature immersion, and sexual union. He found that self-actualizing people — those functioning at their highest potential — reported peak experiences more frequently.

Maslow’s description of peak experience characteristics reads like a modern mystical experience questionnaire:

• Loss of fear, anxiety, and inhibition
• Perception of the world as beautiful and good
• Feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and more humble
• Sense of unity with all existence
• Time distortion
• The experience as its own justification — intrinsically valuable
• Perception of the world as having meaning and purpose

Late in his career, Maslow added a level beyond self-actualization to his hierarchy: self-transcendence — the motivation to connect to something beyond the ego. He came to believe that the peak experience pointed toward humanity’s highest capacity: not just fulfilling individual potential, but transcending individual identity altogether.

Walter Stace: The Universal Core

Walter Stace (1886-1967), a British philosopher, made a controversial and enduring argument in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960): beneath the cultural and theological differences, all mystical experiences share a universal core.

Stace distinguished two types:

Extrovertive mysticism: The perception of unity in the multiplicity of external objects. The world looks the same but is experienced as fundamentally one — alive, sacred, interconnected. The mystic sees the divine in everything. Colors are more vivid, sounds more resonant, and the boundary between perceiver and perceived thins or disappears.

Introvertive mysticism: The experience of a pure, undifferentiated consciousness — consciousness without content. All sensory experience drops away, all thought ceases, and what remains is awareness itself: infinite, timeless, blissful, and more real than anything the mystic has ever experienced. This is the Buddhist sunyata (emptiness), the Hindu nirguna Brahman (formless absolute), the Christian “cloud of unknowing,” the Sufi fana (annihilation of self).

Stace argued that these two types appear across all traditions with remarkable consistency, and that the theological interpretations layered on afterward — calling it God, Brahman, the Tao, the Void — are secondary. The experience comes first. The interpretation comes after.

This universalist position has been debated vigorously. Steven Katz and the constructivists argue that there is no “raw” experience — all experience is shaped by the cultural and conceptual framework of the experiencer. A Christian mystic and a Buddhist meditator may have genuinely different experiences, not just different interpretations.

The debate remains unresolved. But the practical convergence — that practitioners across traditions describe strikingly similar experiences when they reach certain depths of practice — is difficult to dismiss.

The Mystical Experience Questionnaire: Measuring the Immeasurable

Frederick Barrett and Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University developed and validated the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) in 2015, creating a 30-item instrument that reliably measures four dimensions of mystical experience:

1. Mystical (15 items): Internal and external unity, noetic quality, sacredness. Sample items: “Experience of the fusion of your personal self into a larger whole,” “Sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words.”

2. Positive Mood (6 items): Peace, joy, love, tenderness. “Feelings of tenderness and gentleness,” “Experience of amazement.”

3. Transcendence of Time and Space (6 items): “Loss of your usual sense of time,” “Experience of timelessness.”

4. Ineffability (3 items): “Sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words,” “Feeling that you experienced something profoundly sacred and holy.”

The MEQ30 was developed using data from psychedelic studies at Hopkins and validated against Ralph Hood’s earlier Mysticism Scale (1975), which itself was based on Stace’s philosophical framework. Having a validated instrument means that researchers can now compare mystical experiences across different methods of induction (meditation, psychedelics, spontaneous occurrence, fasting) and across different populations.

This matters because it transforms mystical experience from philosophical abstraction into measurable phenomenon.

Neuroscience: Mapping the God Spot

Andrew Newberg: Brain Scans of Mystics

Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University, has spent decades imaging the brains of people during intense spiritual experiences — Franciscan nuns in prayer, Buddhist monks in deep meditation, Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues.

His key finding, published in multiple studies and summarized in Why God Won’t Go Away (2001, co-authored with Eugene d’Aquili), involves the posterior superior parietal lobule — a brain region he calls the “orientation association area” (OAA). This region normally processes sensory information to create the sense of a physical self located in space — the felt boundary between “me” and “everything else.”

During peak meditation and prayer experiences, Newberg observed significantly decreased activity in the OAA. When this region goes quiet, the brain can no longer construct the boundary between self and world. The result: the experience of boundless unity, of being one with all existence.

This is not an argument that mystical experience is “just” brain activity — Newberg himself rejects that reductionism. The brain may be receiving an experience rather than generating it, much as a radio receives a signal it does not create. The decreased parietal activity may represent the removal of a filter rather than the production of an illusion.

Additional findings from Newberg’s lab:

• Increased frontal lobe activity during focused meditation (attention and will)
• Decreased activity in the amygdala (reduced fear and threat detection)
• Changes in thalamic activity (altered sensory processing)
• Increased dopamine in the striatum (accounting for the bliss component)

Michael Persinger: The God Helmet

Michael Persinger (1945-2018), a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada, took a more provocative approach. He developed a device — nicknamed the “God Helmet” — that used weak, complex magnetic fields applied to the temporal lobes to induce experiences that subjects described in mystical terms: presences in the room, feelings of cosmic unity, encounters with divine beings.

Persinger’s interpretation was reductionist: mystical experiences are produced by temporal lobe activity, and they can be artificially induced with magnetic stimulation. This does not make them less meaningful, he argued, but it does locate them firmly in neuroscience rather than theology.

His work has been controversial. A Swedish team (Granqvist et al., 2005) attempted to replicate the God Helmet experiments with double-blind controls and found that suggestion and expectancy, rather than the magnetic fields themselves, accounted for most of the reported experiences. Persinger contested these findings, citing methodological differences.

The debate highlights a crucial methodological issue: how do you separate the direct effects of a stimulus from the expectations and beliefs of the subject? In mystical experience research, this remains one of the most challenging questions.

The Default Mode Network

More recent neuroscience has focused on the default mode network (DMN) — a set of interconnected brain regions (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, angular gyrus, and others) that are active during self-referential thinking: ruminating, planning, worrying, constructing the autobiographical narrative of “me.”

Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London have shown that both deep meditation and psychedelic substances reduce activity in the DMN. When the self-referencing network quiets, the sense of being a separate “I” dissolves. This correlates directly with reports of ego dissolution and mystical unity.

The DMN model offers a unifying framework: diverse practices and substances that produce mystical experiences may all work, at least in part, by quieting the brain’s self-construction machinery. When the brain stops building the “me” narrative, what remains is undifferentiated awareness — the introvertive mystical experience that Stace described.

Psychedelic Mystical Experiences: The Johns Hopkins Studies

Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University conducted a series of landmark studies beginning in 2006 that placed psychedelic mystical experiences under rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Griffiths 2006: Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical Experiences

In a double-blind, crossover study published in Psychopharmacology, 36 healthy volunteers received either psilocybin or methylphenidate (Ritalin, as an active placebo) in two separate sessions. Participants were screened for psychological stability and had no prior psychedelic experience.

Results: 67% of participants rated the psilocybin session as either the single most spiritually significant experience of their lives or among the top five. The experiences met criteria for “complete” mystical experience on the MEQ. Two months later, 79% reported moderately or greatly increased well-being and life satisfaction.

Griffiths 2008: Lasting Personality Change

In a follow-up published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Griffiths demonstrated that a single psilocybin-occasioned mystical experience produced lasting increases in the personality trait of Openness — one of the Big Five personality traits, typically considered stable after age 30. The increase was significant and sustained at 14-month follow-up.

This was unprecedented. A single experience producing measurable, lasting personality change in healthy adults goes against virtually everything personality psychology had established about trait stability.

Griffiths 2018: Fourteen-Month Follow-Up

Extended follow-up studies confirmed that the effects of psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences were durable. At 14 months:

• 94% of participants continued to rate it among the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives
• 64% still rated it as the single most meaningful or among the top five
• Significant sustained improvements in well-being, life satisfaction, and prosocial behavior
• Increased sense of meaning and spiritual significance
• No evidence of harm in psychologically screened participants in controlled settings

The critical variable was not the drug itself but the mystical experience — participants who had complete mystical experiences (as measured by the MEQ) showed the greatest and most lasting benefits. Psilocybin was the catalyst; the mystical experience was the medicine.

Are Mystical Experiences “Real”? Multiple Frameworks

The question of whether mystical experiences reveal something true about the nature of reality or are “merely” products of brain chemistry is perhaps the most profound question at the intersection of science and spirituality.

Several frameworks:

Reductionist/Materialist: Mystical experiences are produced by specific brain states — decreased parietal activity, DMN suppression, temporal lobe activation, serotonin 2A receptor agonism. They are fascinating and clinically useful but do not represent contact with a transcendent reality.

Perennialist: Mystical experiences represent genuine contact with an ultimate reality that transcends the material world. Different traditions describe it differently, but the core experience is a direct encounter with what is — the ground of being, God, Brahman, the Tao.

Constructivist: Mystical experiences are real experiences but are always shaped by cultural context, expectations, and conceptual frameworks. There is no “raw” mystical experience — only culturally mediated ones.

Pragmatist (James’s position): The question of ultimate reality may be unanswerable. What matters is: does the experience produce good fruit? Does it increase compassion, reduce suffering, enhance meaning, improve functioning? By these criteria, mystical experiences are among the most beneficial human experiences documented.

Participatory (Jorge Ferrer): Mystical experiences are not discoveries of a pre-existing reality or constructions of the human mind, but co-creative participations in the unfolding of reality itself. The mystic does not merely perceive the divine — the mystic and the divine co-create the experience together.

Nondual: The question “are mystical experiences real?” presupposes a separation between the experiencer and reality that the mystical experience itself dissolves. The question is the problem. In the experience, there is no subject perceiving an object — there is only undivided awareness.

Integration: The Most Important Part

Having a mystical experience is not the end of the journey but the beginning of a new one. The peak fades. The groceries still need buying. The relationship is still strained. The body still aches.

The real work — as every serious tradition insists — is integration: allowing the insights of the mystical experience to transform daily life, relationships, values, and actions. A mystical experience that does not produce greater compassion, humility, and engagement with the world has not been fully integrated.

James knew this. He evaluated mystical experiences not by their drama but by their fruits. Maslow knew this — he distinguished between the peak experience itself and the “plateau experience” of those who had integrated their insights into a stable way of being. The Johns Hopkins researchers know this — their protocols include extensive integration sessions where participants process and apply their experiences.

If the most meaningful experiences humans can have involve the dissolution of the sense of separate self and the direct perception of interconnection — and if science is now confirming that these experiences produce measurable, lasting improvements in well-being, personality, and prosocial behavior — what does this suggest about the nature of the self that dissolves, and the reality that remains?