<h2 id="4321363a-7001-4801-96e1-1d86f0247792" data-toc-id="4321363a-7001-4801-96e1-1d86f0247792" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Trance is weirder — and more studyable — than people assume</h2><p>A few decades back I sat in on a mediumship circle for the first time, expecting either total theatre or total silence. What I got instead was somewhere in between: a woman's voice changing pitch, her hands moving in ways she swore afterward she didn't consciously control, and a room full of people who clearly weren't faking how moved they were. Whatever was happening, it wasn't nothing.</p><p>That's the tension I want to sit in for this whole piece. For the people who practice it, trance mediumship isn't a party trick — it's prayer, it's grief work, it's how guidance gets delivered, it inspires and it heals. And at the same time, it's a measurable brain state. Not perfectly measurable, but measurable enough that neuroscientists can say "yeah, something's genuinely shifting here."</p><p>I'm not here to debunk anyone, and I'm definitely not going to pretend science has religion figured out. It doesn't. What I actually want to do is walk through what neuroscience can and can't tell us about trance — honestly, without sneering at the people who live it and without overselling what a brain scan actually proves.</p><p>Quick vocab check before we go further, because these words get mashed together constantly. Trance is the umbrella term — narrowed attention, a shifted sense of self. Mediumship usually means someone's acting as a go-between for a spirit or a deceased person. Possession is the feeling that someone else has grabbed the wheel — welcomed in some traditions, feared in others. Channeling is basically mediumship's cousin, usually framed as receiving teachings rather than messages from the dead. Then you've got ecstatic prayer — the trembling, weeping, speaking-in-tongues end of the spectrum — and contemplative absorption, the quiet, inward stuff like centering prayer or deep meditation.</p><p>None of these are airtight categories, but they save us from lumping totally different things together. A medium sitting silently in a dim room is doing something physiologically nothing like a dancer mid-possession at a drumming ceremony. Same word, completely different toll on the nervous system.</p><p>We're going to get into fMRI, EEG, brainwaves — the whole toolkit. But keep this in your back pocket: nobody goes into trance to produce a graph. They do it because it means something.</p><h2 id="4f5614ac-25d3-4d72-a3fc-4a1490491e3b" data-toc-id="4f5614ac-25d3-4d72-a3fc-4a1490491e3b" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Trance looks totally different depending on where you look</h2><p>If "trance" conjures up one specific image in your head, toss it out, because there isn't one universal version of this.</p><p>Spiritualist mediums in the UK and US tend to do quiet sittings and automatic writing. Afro-diasporic traditions like Vodou, Candomblé, and Santería weave possession into music, dance, and community roles. Shamanic traditions often lean on drumming and journeying toward healing or spirit contact. Charismatic Christianity has ecstatic prayer, glossolalia, being "slain in the Spirit." Sufism uses chanting and rhythmic movement to dissolve the ordinary self. Hindu and Buddhist practices range from devotional ecstasy all the way to extremely disciplined, quiet concentration.</p><p>Here's why that matters for science: a still, quiet trance and a loud, spinning, drumming trance are not doing the same thing to a body. Heart rate's different. Muscle tension's different. Social feedback is different. So when some study claims "the trance brain looks like this," the first question should always be — okay, but which trance?</p><p>Even with all that variety, a few things keep showing up: people get pulled hard into inner imagery or a felt presence, they lose touch with their ordinary sense of self (sometimes with actual memory gaps), the sense of who's driving shifts ("it came through me," "I watched myself talk"), attention either narrows way down or floods with stuff, emotions run high, and the whole thing happens inside a social context that shapes what people expect and feel.</p><p>That last part is easy to underrate. A first-timer's trance is often messy and unpredictable. Someone who's done this for twenty years usually describes something calmer and way more consistent. Training reshapes the brain over time, and just knowing what a ritual expects of you is a bigger confound than people give it credit for.</p><h2 id="07d95341-2c2b-4ec9-b922-28c680c9e298" data-toc-id="07d95341-2c2b-4ec9-b922-28c680c9e298" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Neurotheology, without the jargon</h2><p>Neurotheology lives at the intersection of neuroscience, theology, psychology of religion, and consciousness studies. It wants to know which brain networks light up during spiritual experience, how prayer or ritual reshapes attention and your sense of self, what changes after years of practice, and how belief itself colours what someone actually feels.</p><p>But the good version of this field also knows where to shut up. A neural correlate isn't a cause, and it's definitely not a verdict. An EEG blip doesn't disprove God any more than a spiritual explanation replaces the actual mechanism.</p><p>Watch out for three traps that show up constantly: the "God spot" myth, where one brain region supposedly explains all of religion (brains don't work that way); the sensational headline version — "scientists find the mystical experience switch"; and reverse inference, where someone assumes a specific feeling just because one region activated, when that region's probably doing ten other jobs too. Done right, neurotheology stays humble. It describes patterns instead of handing down verdicts.</p><h2 id="6383f86d-1048-4970-909b-96caaff2ab86" data-toc-id="6383f86d-1048-4970-909b-96caaff2ab86" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">EEG vs. fMRI: two very different tools</h2><p>Two machines dominate this research, and they're basically opposites.</p><p>EEG picks up electrical activity at the scalp. Its superpower is timing — it catches fast shifts almost instantly. Its weakness is that it's easily fooled by artifacts: blinking, jaw clenching, any facial movement. And trance, annoyingly, often involves movement.</p><p>fMRI tracks blood-oxygen changes as a stand-in for brain activity. It's much better at pinpointing where something's happening, but it's slow, loud, and cramped — not exactly a great setting for a spiritual experience. Try feeling transcendent while a machine is banging around your skull and someone's telling you to hold still.</p><p>Because of that tradeoff, serious research usually combines both. In practice that means adapting the ritual to fit the lab: resting scans before and after, guided imagery standing in for the real thing, button presses instead of speaking out loud. Every adaptation is a compromise — useful, but never quite the real deal.</p><h2 id="ec175657-f9e7-4a44-af24-d422f6056664" data-toc-id="ec175657-f9e7-4a44-af24-d422f6056664" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What brainwaves can (and can't) tell you</h2><p>You've probably heard the classic brainwave bands thrown around. Quick and dirty version, with the caveat that none of these map cleanly onto one single "state."</p><p>Delta shows up mostly in deep sleep. Theta tracks with drowsiness, imagery, memory, and often absorption. Alpha shows up during relaxed, eyes-closed wakefulness. Beta ramps up with active thinking and movement. Gamma gets linked to attention and high-level processing, but it's also incredibly easy to contaminate with muscle noise.</p><p>In quieter, absorptive practices, theta and alpha tend to rise — which lines up with that inward, narrowing feeling people describe. In more active channeling, where someone's actually talking, beta shows up more, because speaking isn't a passive act.</p><p>Be sceptical any time someone claims gamma "spikes" during a mystical experience. Chanting, tensing muscles, holding a posture — all of that can fake a gamma signal that has nothing to do with an actual cognitive shift.</p><p>Then there's entrainment: drumming, chanting, repeated prayer can sync up timing across the brain and body. That doesn't make whatever comes through paranormal — it just means rhythm is a genuinely powerful lever. And the big caveat here: none of these EEG patterns are unique to mediumship. Same signatures pop up in hypnosis, daydreaming, ordinary meditation. EEG tells you something changed. It can't tell you which metaphysical story is the right one.</p><h2 id="1269d1ee-c5a2-4602-ac8a-670c0e8d52ca" data-toc-id="1269d1ee-c5a2-4602-ac8a-670c0e8d52ca" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What fMRI shows about the "sense of another presence"</h2><p>This is where the self and agency questions get genuinely interesting.</p><p>The default mode network handles self-referential thought — your inner narrator, autobiographical memory, mind-wandering. Salience networks decide what deserves your attention right now. Executive control networks handle the deliberate, top-down stuff.</p><p>Trance reports line up with these surprisingly well. People describe a quieter, less central "I" during mediumship, which could track with changes in default mode activity. They describe a louder sense of inner voices or presence, which could track with shifts in salience processing.</p><p>Agency is the big question. "It is speaking through me" is, in neuroscience terms, really asking who initiated the speech and who's actually steering. Researchers can look at speech-planning regions and how control networks talk to self-monitoring systems — but finding the neural fingerprint of that shift doesn't settle whether the experience is imagination, spirit contact, or something else. It tells you how it's implemented, not what it means.</p><h2 id="65ffa0b5-84a4-484a-be2e-1c5c2d88f8a1" data-toc-id="65ffa0b5-84a4-484a-be2e-1c5c2d88f8a1" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Trance vs. clinical dissociation: don't collapse these</h2><p>There's a mistake people make in both directions here. One is treating any religious experience as inherently pathological. The other is romanticising genuine clinical symptoms because they sound mystical. Both miss the point badly.</p><p>Plenty of dissociation is completely non-pathological — brief depersonalisation during a ritual doesn't mean someone has a disorder. What makes something clinical — dissociative identity disorder, PTSD-related dissociation, psychosis-spectrum experiences — isn't strangeness, it's distress and impairment. It's whether it's wrecking someone's life.</p><p>Context does a lot of heavy lifting here. A voice heard inside a supportive community, with clear ritual boundaries, tends to be far less distressing than the same voice heard alone and unexplained. So watch your language: don't call believers delusional, and don't dress up disorders as spiritual gifts. Stay focused on how someone's actually functioning.</p><h2 id="2973b6b7-4659-404c-b06e-76acfe7f2107" data-toc-id="2973b6b7-4659-404c-b06e-76acfe7f2107" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">How you'd actually design a good study on this</h2><p>Sticking someone in a scanner and hoping for the best isn't science, it's a photo op.</p><p>You need experienced mediums and genuinely matched controls — not just random sceptics off the street. Match for cultural background, prior meditation or prayer experience, personality traits like absorption, suggestibility. You need a real baseline, and if the medium's speaking or writing, you have to separate the trance effect from the simple effect of producing language, because talking changes brain activity all on its own — and so does emotion, and so does knowing someone's watching you.</p><p>If you're testing actual information claims, blinded scoring matters a lot. Then there's the boring-but-crucial list of confounds: sleep deprivation, breathwork effects, caffeine, how loud and fast the music is, people unconsciously giving researchers what they think they want, prior rehearsal of "going into trance" specifically for the lab. And underneath all that, basic scientific hygiene — clean data, preregistration, publishing the null results, replicating across labs. This is exactly where the field either grows up or keeps churning out flashy one-off headlines.</p><h2 id="74d1b1b6-9f7e-40c7-b085-024086724429" data-toc-id="74d1b1b6-9f7e-40c7-b085-024086724429" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Where science just... stops</h2><p>Brain scans describe what accompanies conscious experience. They can't tell you whether spirits are real, confirm an afterlife, or disprove God. That was never what the tool was built for.</p><p>This runs straight into the oldest question in consciousness research: why does any of this feel like something from the inside? Why is there a first-person view at all? Neuroscience can map the conditions around a vivid sense of presence — it can't yet explain why that presence feels so real.</p><p>It helps to keep two kinds of explanation separate. One's mechanistic — how the brain builds or shapes an experience. The other's existential or theological — what that experience actually means, how it ties into ethics, hope, ancestors, community. Neuroscience lights up the conditions; theology handles the meaning. They're not competing for the same job. Honestly, most people already live this way — academia's just slow to catch up.</p><h2 id="f37197ce-357f-4836-966e-17c2b014f28f" data-toc-id="f37197ce-357f-4836-966e-17c2b014f28f" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Talking about trance without insulting anyone</h2><p>Talking to scientists, precision is the respectful move. Keep what's reported and observed separate from what's ultimately, metaphysically true. Skip the ridicule and skip the sensationalism — "this proves spirits are real" isn't science, and neither is "this proves believers are deluded." The second one's just bad philosophy wearing a lab coat.</p><p>Talking to a religious audience, frame neuroscience as describing the instrument — the brain and body — without implying that description cancels out anything spiritual. Most traditions already have room for this. People have always known fasting, singing, breath, grief, and community shape the soul's experience; neuroscience is just measuring some of that same ground with different tools.</p><p>Ethics matters on both sides — real informed consent, no exploitation, cultural sensitivity, mental-health screening when intense states are on the table. Researchers shouldn't treat practitioners like curiosities, and religious communities shouldn't pressure vulnerable people into extreme states without care.</p><p>Ultimately, trance mediumship is a real, lived human experience. EEG and fMRI can map some of what goes with it, and sometimes help explain how attention, selfhood, and agency shift underneath. Neurotheology, done well, just holds science and religion in the same room without flattening either one into a punchline.</p><p>We have to accept that trance is no more palatable to the sceptic for showing brain changes and religion can’t be confirmed in a scanner.</p><p>Maybe one day - but not now. Neurotheology and it’s work, is definitely here and interest is growing.</p><p></p><p>Enrol in our trance courses <a target="" href="https://www.developingspirit.com/all-coursehttps://www.developingspirit.com/course-detail/the-all-trance-course-bundle/46885/">HERE</a></p><p>All premium courses <a target="" href="https://www.developingspirit.com/all-courses">HERE</a></p><p>Join my community <a target="" href="https://www.skool.com/myinnercircle/about">HERE</a></p><p></p>

Explore how trance bridges neuroscience and religion, blending spiritual experience with scientific study of altered consciousness.

Neurotheology: What Happens in the Brain During Trance

Trance is weirder — and more studyable — than people assume

Trance looks totally different depending on where you look

What fMRI shows about the "sense of another presence"

Trance vs. clinical dissociation: don't collapse these

How you'd actually design a good study on this

Talking about trance without insulting anyone

Explore spiritual development articles by Helen DaVita on mediumship, clairaudience, trance, shamanism, and soul growth. Deepen your spiritual practice today.

Spiritual Development Blog – Mediumship, Intuition & Soul Growth

Join Helen DaVita's spiritual development blog. Read practical insights on mediumship, spirituality, intuition, trance, and soul growth at Developing Spirit.

Neurotheology: What Happens in the Brain During Trance

Neurotheology: What Happens in the Brain During Trance

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