John Sullivan

Why do mystical experiences feel so deeply natural yet profoundly divergent from ordinary waking consciousness? The hypothesis is that brain activity associated with spiritual and religious experience provides a perfect template for guiding the architecture necessary to maintain consciousness in a developing brain. In other words, the human brain is not wired for spiritual experience; rather, brain activity resembling a spiritual experience is how the brain is wired to maintain consciousness. It is the template or archetypal pattern. This is why a profound spiritual experience feels so deeply innate, like coming home. It is the reemergence of unique neural activity, providing a window into how the physical brain is constructed to maintain the enduring mystery we call consciousness. It is well established that spontaneously generated, internal brain activity is a foundational mechanism of brain development. This brain activity is not random; it encodes information to model both local neural circuits and the white-matter pathways that connect them, precisely the type of neural developmental behavior one would expect to see if the hypothesis were plausible. More recently, a growing body of evidence suggests that mystical experiences can trigger neural developmental mechanisms in the adult brain. This line of evidence, which stems from psychedelic research, is especially compelling because it aligns with a well-established outcome of spiritual or religious experiences: their capacity to produce lasting, positive changes in a person’s beliefs and behavior, regardless of the origin of the subjective experience. It suggests that both naturally occurring mystical experiences and pharmacologically induced ones may achieve their transformative power by temporarily reactivating the same neurodevelopmental pathways that the brain initially used during early development. If the sciences revealed that the developmental mechanisms shaping our conscious minds are related to our capacity to experience awe, connection, transcendence, and meaning, it would fundamentally reframe our understanding of ourselves. The quest for meaning and the exploration of inner life might have their physical roots in the developmental trajectory of becoming a conscious human being.

After spending a semester and summer in Malta training as a freediver, I returned to my studies at the University of Arizona with lingering questions surrounding the nature of spiritual or religious experiences. This led my undergraduate coursework to pivot toward the biology and phenomenology of consciousness, including a year and a half of independent research.  I have a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Arizona.