The human brain

The human brain has an innate propensity for spiritual experiences.

Not all neurological disorders have a negative impact on a person’s life. In fact, every now and then, you meet a person whose so-called “disorder” has profoundly transformed their life for the better.

Enter Paul. Paul was an assistant manager at his local Goodwill store. But in his spare time, he liked to read, write, and have conversations with God.

Paul began hearing God in his early teens – around the same time he started having epileptic seizures. During his seizures he felt immersed in a bright light, gripped by a serene clarity, and filled with a sense of oneness with the Creator of all things. These experiences were so rapturous that he had no interest in sex; it paled in comparison.

Our understanding of seizures tends to be limited to the muscular variety – violent, involuntary contractions of the muscles that can cause someone to fall to the ground and convulse. These are known as grand mal seizures, and they occur when the entire brain is engulfed by a storm of electrical activity. But seizures can also be localized. If the electrical disruption happens in the limbic system, then the symptoms will be predominantly emotional.

Patients like Paul who have these emotional sorts of seizures report symptoms ranging from incomparable ecstasy to fits of extreme terror, rage, or despair. But the most profound experiences that can occur are spiritual in nature. Patients recount feeling a divine presence and deep connection to the cosmos.

Now, whether these patients genuinely are, or are not, experiencing communion with the divine is a question for another time. The point is that we have neural circuitry in our brains that, when stimulated, tends to induce profound, metaphysical experiences. Could it be that humans have evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of facilitating the mystical – just as we have specialized circuitry for understanding language or perceiving color?

It’s possible this capacity to experience the spiritual conferred some kind of evolutionary advantage on our ancestors. But at present, we’re not able to conclude whether the brain evolved specifically to have these kinds of experiences, or if they’re just an accidental by-product of circuitry that developed for another purpose.

Either way, a truly exciting aspect is that questions of spirituality, which have traditionally been the territory of religion, may soon be addressed by science.