God, Brain & Therapy | Neuroscience

The neuroscience of spiritual experience and why it belongs at the center of serious clinical work

There is a conversation happening at the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality that most therapy websites will never mention. It is too complex, too philosophically loaded, too easy to misread in either direction — toward reductionism on one side or magical thinking on the other.

I want to have that conversation directly. Because what the emerging field of neurotheology — the scientific study of what happens in the brain during religious and spiritual experience — has discovered over the past three decades is clinically significant in ways that are impossible to dismiss. And because in more than 30 years of integrative clinical practice I have watched spiritual experience and practice do things in the therapy room that no technique alone has ever replicated.

This post draws on a recently published review in Frontiers in Neuroscience — Carvour, Radke, and French (2025) — alongside other current research in the field. My goal is not to make a theological argument. It is to take seriously what the science actually shows — and to explore what it means for the kind of deep, lasting psychological healing that is the center of my work.

What Is Neurotheology?

Neurotheology — also called spiritual neuroscience — is the scientific investigation of the relationship between brain function and religious or spiritual experience. Using brain imaging technologies including fMRI, EEG, and PET scanning, researchers have spent the past three decades mapping what happens neurologically during prayer, meditation, ritual, and mystical experience.

The findings are remarkable. And they are increasingly difficult to explain away.

What researchers have discovered is not that spiritual experience is simply brain activity and nothing more — that reductionist conclusion goes beyond what the data supports. What they have discovered is that spiritual experience engages some of the most fundamental and evolutionarily significant brain systems we possess — the systems governing social connection, reward and meaning, stress regulation, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience.

In other words the brain was built — or evolved, depending on your framework — for exactly this kind of experience. And understanding that has profound implications for therapy.

Prayer and the Social Brain

One of the most striking findings in neurotheology research is what happens in the brain during personal prayer. Brain imaging studies of highly religious individuals engaged in prayer have found activation in a network of regions centrally involved in social cognition — the temporopolar region, the temporoparietal junction, the precuneus, and the medial prefrontal cortex.

These are the same regions that activate when we are in genuine conversation with another person — when we are trying to understand another mind, to feel what someone else feels, to be known and to know.

Prayer, neurologically speaking, engages the brain as if it were a real relationship with a real other. The brain does not distinguish between relating to a human being and relating to what the person praying experiences as a divine presence. It recruits the same social architecture — the same neural machinery that makes human connection possible — and it does so with the same depth of engagement.

For a clinician working in the tradition of depth psychology this is not surprising. Jung understood the Self — the deeper organizing center of the psyche — as what religious traditions have called God or the divine ground. The neuroscience does not resolve the metaphysical question of what prayer is ultimately directed toward. But it confirms that the experience of genuine spiritual relationship engages the deepest social and relational capacities of the human mind.

And because human beings heal in relationship — because the therapeutic relationship is itself a primary mechanism of change — this matters clinically.

The Reward System and the Neuroscience of Meaning

Religious and spiritual experience activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system — the same neurological architecture that drives motivation, pleasure, and the pursuit of meaningful goals.

Research with devout Mormon participants found that religious experiences activated the nucleus accumbens, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and frontal attentional regions — a network associated with reward, salience, and attention. Separate research with Danish Christians found increased activity in the caudate nucleus during prayer — a region associated with dopaminergic reward pathways.

What this tells us is that the experience of meaning — the sense that one’s life is connected to something larger and more significant than the immediate concerns of the ego — is not merely philosophical. It is neurobiological. Meaning activates reward. Belonging activates reward. The felt sense of connection to something sacred — whatever that means for any given person — engages the same brain systems that motivate us toward everything we value.

The clinical implications are significant. Depression and meaninglessness are deeply intertwined — not metaphorically but neurologically. The diminishment of reward system activity is one of the core neurobiological features of depression. When spiritual practice and experience restore a sense of connection and meaning they are doing something measurable in the brain — something that maps onto the very systems most compromised in depressive illness.

This is why spiritually attuned therapy is not soft or peripheral to serious clinical work. It is addressing one of the most fundamental neurobiological dimensions of psychological suffering.

Stress, the Body, and Contemplative Practice

The research on how contemplative practice affects stress neurohormones is among the most clinically actionable in neurotheology.

Prayer, meditation, and other calming spiritual practices have been documented to reduce circulating levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol — the primary hormones of the body’s stress response system. These are not small or temporary effects. They represent a measurable shift in the physiological state of a nervous system that has been chronically dysregulated by stress, trauma, or anxiety.

Cortisol in particular is worth noting. Chronic cortisol elevation is associated with hippocampal damage, immune suppression, cardiovascular disease, disrupted sleep, and the worsening of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Practices that reliably reduce cortisol are not optional extras in a comprehensive approach to mental health. They are addressing the physiological substrate of psychological suffering at a fundamental level.

Furthermore meditation has been found to increase GABA — the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter — with effects that parallel those of anti-anxiety medications. And a one-week spiritual retreat program was found to alter dopamine and serotonin reuptake sites in ways that resemble the mechanism of action of antidepressant medications.

The brain does not recognize a clean boundary between spiritual practice and pharmacological intervention. What matters is what the practice actually does to the nervous system. And the evidence is clear that contemplative and spiritual practice does a great deal.

The Prefrontal Cortex, Mystical Experience, and the Limits of Rational Control

One of the most counterintuitive findings in neurotheology is what research on traumatic brain injury has revealed about the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and mystical experience.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the region most associated with executive function, rational analysis, and cognitive control — appears to play a regulatory or inhibitory role in mystical experience. Individuals who have suffered damage to the dlPFC report significantly more mystical experiences than those with intact prefrontal function. The relaxation of rational, analytical inhibition appears to open access to experiences that the ordinary executive mind keeps at bay.

This finding resonates deeply with what depth psychology has understood clinically for over a century. The ego — Jung’s term for the ordinary conscious mind, the executive function of the psyche — does not have unmediated access to the deeper layers of inner experience. The unconscious, the Self, the deeper organizing center of the psyche — these are not accessible through analytical thinking alone. They require a different mode of engagement. A different kind of attention.

This is what contemplative practice, spiritual experience, depth psychotherapy, and EMDR all share at a fundamental level — they work at the boundary between ordinary conscious control and something deeper. They engage what the executive mind cannot access through effort alone.

Oxytocin, Social Bonding, and Spiritual Connectedness

Oxytocin — the neurohormone most associated with social bonding, attachment, social recognition, and prosocial behavior — has been found to correlate with reported levels of spirituality.

Participants who report higher levels of spiritual connectedness show elevated oxytocin levels in salivary assays. The experience of spiritual connection — with the divine, with a community of faith, with something larger than oneself — engages the same neurochemistry that underlies human attachment and belonging.

This is clinically significant for several reasons. Trauma — particularly developmental and relational trauma — disrupts the oxytocin system. The capacity for secure attachment, for genuine belonging, for the experience of being held by something larger than the isolated self — these are precisely what early relational trauma undermines. And they are precisely what spiritual practice and experience, at their most genuine, can restore.

I have witnessed this in the therapy room more times than I can count. A client who cannot yet trust another human being finds themselves capable of a relationship with something they call the divine — and that experience of being held begins to reorganize their capacity for human connection. The neuroscience is beginning to explain what clinical observation had already confirmed.

The Serotonin System and the Mystical

Research on psilocybin — the psychoactive compound in certain mushrooms — has opened a window into the relationship between serotonin and mystical experience. Psilocybin has high binding affinity for the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. When administered in carefully controlled research settings nearly all participants report what they describe as religious or spiritual experiences of profound personal significance.

This finding suggests that the serotonergic system — the same neurochemical system targeted by antidepressant medications — plays a significant role in the capacity for mystical and spiritual experience. High levels of serotonergic signaling appear to open access to experiences that ordinary neurochemical states keep closed.

The research on adjacent Ketamine therapy — which I incorporate as a referral option for appropriate clients — points in a related direction. The neurochemical systems involved in depression, in spiritual experience, and in the kind of ego dissolution that allows genuine psychological reorganization are deeply interconnected. This is not coincidence. It reflects something fundamental about the architecture of the human mind.

Jung himself addressed the relationship between knowledge and belief — between lived inner experience and doctrinal faith — in an interview that has become one of the most watched clips in the history of depth psychology. His answer to a simple question captures something essential about why spiritual experience cannot be reduced to either neuroscience or theology alone — and why it belongs at the center of serious psychological work.

What This Means for Therapy

Neurotheology does not reduce spiritual experience to brain activity and nothing more. Finding a neural correlate for prayer does not mean prayer is nothing but neurons firing — any more than finding a neural correlate for love means love is nothing but brain chemistry. The philosophical questions remain open. The mystery remains intact.

What neurotheology does do is confirm that spiritual experience and practice engage real neurological systems in clinically significant ways. That these experiences are not peripheral to psychological health but in many cases central to it. That the brain appears to be organized — at a fundamental architectural level — for exactly this kind of experience.

In my integrative practice in Fort Collins I take spirituality seriously as a clinical dimension — not as a theological position but as a domain of human experience with documented neurobiological significance. When a client brings their spiritual life into the therapy room I do not treat it as a coping strategy or a cultural artifact. I treat it as a window into some of the deepest and most clinically significant dimensions of their inner world.

Furthermore the convergence between what neurotheology is discovering and what depth psychology has always understood is striking. Jung’s understanding of the Self as the organizing center of the psyche — his sense that the deepest healing involves integration of conscious and unconscious experience, ego and something larger — maps with remarkable precision onto what brain imaging is now revealing about how spiritual experience works.

The brain and the soul are not as separate as modernity assumed. And in the space where they meet is where some of the most profound healing I have witnessed in thirty years of clinical practice has occurred.

A Final Reflection

The research reviewed in this post is drawn primarily from Carvour, Radke, and French (2025) “A Review of the Neuroscience of Religion“ published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, supplemented by related peer-reviewed literature in the field. Neurotheology is a young and still developing field — its methods have real limitations and its conclusions require careful interpretation. But the direction of the evidence is clear and consistent enough to take seriously.

Spiritual experience is not epiphenomenal. It is not the soft end of mental health. It is neurobiologically real — engaging reward, social connection, stress regulation, attachment, and the integrative processes that make genuine psychological transformation possible.

That is worth taking seriously. In the therapy room and beyond.

— John Kinnaird LCSW, EMDR Level II, CHt.

If this post resonates with questions you are carrying — about the intersection of your inner life, your spiritual experience, and the kind of deep healing you are looking for — I invite you to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation. This kind of integrative depth work is at the heart of what I do at Mindful Transitions in Fort Collins.