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mystical experience

05.03.2016

The mystical experience can be described in different ways: someone feels the presence of some higher powers, someone discovers higher knowledge, someone's perception changes, etc. For someone, "mysticism" happens in a hospital, in an intensive care unit , someone is visited by strange visions when immersed in a meditative trance. During a mystical experience, a person understands that something inexplicable has happened to him, beyond the limits of understanding.

Neurobiological hypotheses that explain mystical experience are usually divided into two parts: some say that there is a certain generator of the transcendent in the brain - a special zone that, when activated, gives us some strange experiences, while others argue that the whole thing is not so much in a particular zone, how much is that the braking system does not work very well in the brain.

The work of the nervous system as a whole looks like an alternation of waves of excitation and inhibition. In order to bend the arm, you need to excite a group of flexor muscles and slow down a group of extensor muscles, and in order to regulate muscle strength, you need to extinguish the excitation in those neurons that induce the muscle to contract in time. The same thing happens in emotions and in thinking. In order to suppress a neuron that generates an excitatory signal, another neuron must turn on - an inhibitory or inhibitory neuron, which, having activated itself, will suppress the activity of the excitatory neuron.

In other words, inhibition is not just "turning off the brain", as it might seem. When braking, the brain works as it did, just now other nerve pathways are activated in it. And, if these very paths suddenly break down, if their activity falls, then the nervous system is threatened with overexcitation, which can manifest itself in improper muscle work, and in emotional instability, and in general in behavior.

Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University, along with colleagues from other medical centers in the United States and New Zealand, analyzed the brain state of nearly XNUMX Vietnam War veterans. All of them underwent psychological tests before they were sent to the places of hostilities, and after returning from there.

Some of the soldiers received brain injuries, and many of them suddenly began to see members of their family, who were not actually there, or even hear words coming from, as they said, from some higher being. Mystical experience was evaluated on a special scale (it turns out that there is one). The results of psychological tests were supported by the results of computed tomography of the brain.

The strongest transcendental experiences occurred in those who had damage to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, and this was especially true of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - if the injury affected it, then in most cases one could expect mystical revelations.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex generates the inhibitory impulses discussed above; that is, with a certain degree of certainty, it can be argued that it is the failure of the "brake systems" of the brain that opens the "doors of perception" to us. The frontal lobes are responsible for a lot of everything, from muscle control to memory and speech, so they can very well create something complex and mystical - of course, if they are not interfered with.

According to neuroscientists, the "brake pads" (that is, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) help build a complex explanation for the observed phenomena, the causes of which are not obvious and which are most easily attributed to the intervention of supernatural forces.

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