Research suggests very spiritual different practices may share a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. Markus Kranich/Pexels, CC BY Do the world’s religions and contemplative traditions send people to the same place – compassion, bliss, awe, a sense of God, awareness, or the universe?
We conducted a study that asked a smaller version of this question.
As scientists with a research focus on brain science and spirituality, we ask whether people from very different spiritual traditions – Buddhism and Christian Pentecostalism – use their bodies in similar ways when they’re in intense contemplation.
To make this concrete, let’s play a game. Consider the following quote and ask if it sounds like a person engaged in ecstatic Christian prayer – speaking in tongues – or someone in a deeply quiet Buddhist meditative state known as jhāna.
I let go of everything … It feels like you’re falling. The first few times that happened to me, it was terrifying. I like to call it ‘slipping upward’ because it feels like a lifting to me…
It feels like a constant invitation to let go of more control, and the more control I let go the more powerful an experience it is … The more I let go, the lighter I feel…
Can you tell which is speaking in tongues and which is jhāna? The first was meditation; the second was tongues. If you got it wrong, don’t worry – even experienced contemplative practitioners identify them correctly only about half the time.
Our research suggests that these traditions, which on the surface appear so different, may, in fact, share a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. And further, that this mechanism might be a tool for self-transformation.
It’s true that jhāna meditation and speaking in tongues could hardly look more different.
Jhāna is an ancient Buddhist practice from India, centred on intense concentration. Speaking in tongues is a Christian prayer practice in which worshippers utter a fluid string of speech that doesn’t have a semantic meaning.
In jhāna, the body is still. You sit. You do not move. From the outside, almost nothing seems to happen. The practice is deliberate, austere, and precise. Attention is guided – patiently and repeatedly – back to a single object, often the breath. Gradually, attention gathers. The mind steadies. A sense of ease appears – sometimes warmth, sometimes a spreading pleasure.
In deeper states, meditators describe absorption so complete that the sense of acting or choosing dissolves into something quieter.
Tongues prayer unfolds in a very different register. Sound spills out. Voices rise, overlap, and break apart. Bodies sway or tremble. Some people weep; others laugh. Some rock rhythmically. People may dance.
For those who pray this way, they feel the prayer is not produced by them – it moves through them.
Placed side by side, these practices appear to belong to different worlds. If you only watched, you would not confuse them. Yet when we listened closely to how practitioners described what it felt like from the inside, the contrast began to soften.
For this study we conducted in-depth interviews with 116 practitioners and then mapped their responses against neuroscience theory. The work continues. We are currently exploring the physiological (bodily function) side of the story to see if brain activity can be used to measure the pattern we observed at the level of experience.
Across many conversations – with experienced jhāna meditators and long-time tongues practitioners – we noticed a recurring pattern. Attention gathers. Feeling intensifies. And then, at some unpredictable moment, something releases.
Whether in stillness or fire, the rhythm was familiar. The inner sequence was strikingly similar. Attention to the act of practising feeds arousal of the senses and emotions. Arousal, in turn, stabilises attention. Together, they facilitate the sense of reduced effort – until effort is no longer required at all.
She described it as falling upward – quiet, buoyant – as though the experience were happening through her.
He spoke of shaking, of tears, of feeling small – of God taking over.
