Spiritism and Neuroscience: What Happens When Spiritual Experience Meets the Brain?
For a long time, spirituality and science have been treated as though they must stand on opposite sides of a conversation. If you believe in spirits, consciousness beyond the physical body, mediumship or life after death, you are often expected to move away from science. If you approach these subjects scientifically, you are sometimes expected to dismiss spiritual interpretations altogether. I do not believe we need to do either. I believe we can have a much more interesting and responsible conversation when we allow both areas to exist without forcing one to prove or destroy the other.
Spiritism proposes questions and interpretations about consciousness and spiritual experience. Science provides methods for investigating those experiences, their effects, their biological correlates and, where possible, the accuracy of claims made during them. That distinction is important to me because I do not believe we should take a scientific study, find something interesting happening in the brain and immediately announce that science has proved the existence of spirits. It has not. However, I also do not believe that identifying activity in the brain automatically explains away the spiritual experience itself. Observing what happens neurologically while someone is praying, meditating, reporting a spiritual presence or experiencing what they understand to be mediumistic communication tells us something extremely valuable about the brain. It does not necessarily answer every question about the origin or meaning of that experience.
This becomes particularly interesting when we talk about consciousness. Neuroscience can investigate the brain through electrical activity, neural networks, perception, memory, attention and altered states of consciousness. Spiritism approaches consciousness from a different position because it understands the human being as more than the physical body and considers consciousness capable of continuing beyond physical death. These are clearly not identical explanations, and I would never pretend that they are. The scientific question is what can be observed, measured, replicated and investigated. The Spiritist question goes further into the nature of the spirit, survival after death and the relationship between the physical body and consciousness. We therefore have to be careful about where evidence ends and interpretation begins.
This is one of the reasons I am interested in research into spiritual experiences themselves. Prayer, meditation, contemplation, silence and other spiritual practices can be studied scientifically because people are having those experiences while possessing a functioning human brain and nervous system. Researchers can observe changes associated with attention, emotion, sensory processing and the way we experience ourselves in relation to the world around us. This does not mean that researchers have discovered a single area of the brain where spirituality lives, nor does it mean that a brain scan can tell us whether God, a spirit or an archangel exists. What it demonstrates is that spiritual experiences are also human experiences and, because we experience them through our human bodies, there can be measurable biological processes occurring alongside them.
This brings me to something I have discussed many times: the difference between identifying a neurological correlate and identifying the ultimate cause of an experience. If I pray and my brain activity changes, neuroscience can investigate that change. If I meditate and my breathing, attention, emotional state or nervous system changes, those changes can also be investigated. However, if I tell a scientist that during that prayer I felt the presence of a spirit, the fact that something happened in my brain does not by itself establish whether the spirit was present or absent. The brain must participate in the experience because I am experiencing it while living inside a physical body. The more difficult question is what produced the experience and how much of its meaning can be determined through neurological measurement alone.
The same caution should apply when discussing mediumship and channelling. I have never believed that we should approach mediumship by beginning with the conclusion that every person claiming communication with spirits must be communicating with spirits. Human perception is complicated. Memory is complicated. Suggestion, expectation, emotion and unconscious processes are complicated. There are many possible explanations that have to be considered. At the same time, I do not believe the responsible scientific response is to begin with the opposite conclusion and assume that every mediumistic experience must be false, pathological or imaginary. If someone claims to experience communication with something outside themselves, we can ask questions. What happens neurologically during the experience? Does the person's brain activity change? Can information produce during the experience be independently verified? Can the conditions be replicated? What alternative explanations are possible? These are scientific questions, and asking them does not require us to decide the answer before the investigation begins.
Near-death experiences raise similar questions. People from different cultures and belief systems have reported extraordinary experiences close to death or during severe medical emergencies. Science has proposed and investigated different physiological and neurological explanations for these experiences, and research into consciousness surrounding cardiac arrest and dying continues. Spiritism interprets death very differently because physical death is not understood as the end of the spirit. Again, I do not think we need to misuse one field to defend the other. A near-death experience is not automatically proof of an afterlife simply because somebody experienced it, but neither should unanswered questions about consciousness be presented as though they have already been completely resolved. There is a considerable difference between saying, “We have possible neurological explanations for aspects of this experience,” and saying, “We now know everything that happened and therefore there is nothing else to investigate.”
Meditation is another good example because people sometimes describe meditation as though it automatically opens somebody spiritually. I would be much more careful with that language. Meditation changes the way we direct attention. It can reduce external noise and make us more aware of thoughts, physical sensations, memories and internal experiences that we may normally overlook. Someone following a Spiritist understanding may interpret certain experiences during meditation as spiritual perception or communication. Neuroscience can investigate what happens in the person's brain and body during that process. Those two descriptions can exist alongside each other without pretending that the neurological observation proves the spiritual interpretation.
We should apply the same responsibility to people who report voices, visions or the feeling that another presence is close to them. These experiences exist across cultures, religions and periods of human history, but they can also occur in psychological, neurological, sleep-related and other circumstances. There are therefore situations where medical or psychological assessment is extremely important, particularly when an experience is distressing, frightening, disruptive or represents a significant change in someone's normal functioning. A spiritual belief should never be used to discourage somebody from seeking appropriate healthcare. At the same time, acknowledging the existence of psychological and neurological explanations does not require us to ridicule every spiritual interpretation of human experience. We can remain curious while remaining responsible.
The pineal gland is perhaps one of the clearest examples of why this responsibility matters. The pineal gland has a recognised biological role, particularly in the production of melatonin and regulation of circadian rhythms. It has also acquired considerable spiritual significance in religious, philosophical and esoteric discussions, and later Spiritist literature has attributed spiritual functions to it. Those are different categories of claim. We cannot take the established biological functions of the pineal gland and use them as scientific proof that it operates as an antenna or communication centre for spirits. Claims surrounding the pineal gland, DMT and spiritual communication are frequently repeated online with considerably more certainty than the scientific evidence allows. I do not believe Spiritism benefits from exaggerating science in order to make spiritual beliefs appear more credible.
Where neuroscience becomes particularly useful to my own understanding is in the study of behaviour, repetition, attention and neuroplasticity. Human beings learn through repetition. Habits become easier to repeat because our brains and bodies adapt to what we practise consistently. This connects with something I discuss constantly in my own writing: responsibility. What we repeatedly think about, practise, choose and reinforce matters. Spiritism approaches moral and spiritual development through its own philosophical framework, while neuroscience examines learning, behaviour and changes within the nervous system. I do not need neuroscience to prove the Spiritist explanation in order to recognise that both conversations make us consider the importance of what we repeatedly practise in our lives.
For me, this is also where the conversation about spiritual development needs to move away from fascination with extraordinary experiences. Seeing a spirit does not automatically make somebody spiritually developed. Hearing something that someone interprets as a spiritual communication does not automatically make that person wiser, kinder or morally superior. Mediumship itself should not become a measurement of someone's value. My understanding of spiritual development has always been much more connected with responsibility, humility, compassion, charity, self-awareness, forgiveness, learning from our mistakes and becoming better human beings. If a spiritual practice makes us less responsible for our behaviour rather than more responsible, then I believe we should question what we are doing with that spirituality.
Science also requires humility because good science changes when better evidence becomes available. There are things about the brain that we understand far better today than we did fifty years ago, and there remain fundamental questions about consciousness that continue to be debated. Spiritism also asks us to study, question and develop our understanding rather than simply accepting everything we hear because somebody has labelled it spiritual. I find that common willingness to investigate particularly important. We should be able to say, “I don't know.” We should be able to distinguish what we believe from what has been demonstrated. We should also be able to change our minds when the evidence requires us to.
I therefore do not see neuroscience and Spiritism as two enemies fighting for ownership of the human experience. They are approaching some of the same enormous questions from very different directions. Neuroscience can investigate what happens in the brain and body while we pray, meditate, experience altered states, report spiritual encounters or approach death. Spiritism provides a philosophical and spiritual framework through which consciousness, moral development, mediumship and survival beyond physical death are interpreted. Sometimes their questions overlap. Sometimes they do not. Where a spiritual claim becomes testable, science should be allowed to test it. Where science identifies a neurological mechanism, we should accept what the evidence demonstrates rather than changing it to protect a belief.
Perhaps the most responsible place for the conversation to stand is therefore not at “science proves Spiritism” or “science disproves Spiritism,” but somewhere much more interesting. We know that spiritual experiences can affect us psychologically and biologically. We know that the brain participates in everything we consciously experience while we are alive. We know that consciousness remains one of the most difficult subject’s humans have attempted to understand. Beyond those points, there are questions that remain open.
I am comfortable with those unanswered questions. In fact, I think they are precisely why we should continue the conversation.
Spiritism does not need me to manipulate neuroscience in order to defend it, and neuroscience does not require me to abandon my spiritual understanding in order to respect it. I can study both. I can question both. I can accept evidence where evidence exists, acknowledge uncertainty where uncertainty remains, and continue asking what it means to be a conscious, biological and, in my understanding, spiritual human being.
