Scientists map the brain network behind self-transcendence
A Harvard study using surgical brain disruptions finds causal evidence for a neural circuit underlying the experience of moving beyond the self, a phenomenon central to Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, Jewish, and Indigenous contemplative traditions alike
Full paper available at: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.24.713239v1
BOSTON — Across traditions and centuries, contemplatives have described a similar inner movement: the ordinary sense of self loosens, the boundary between “me” and “everything else” grows permeable, and something opens. Christian mystics called it union with God. Buddhists call it no-self. Sufi poets called it the annihilation of the ego in the divine. Now, researchers at Harvard Medical School have identified the specific brain network where that movement appears to originate.
The study, led by first author Morgan Healey and senior author Michael Ferguson, PhD, at the Neurospirituality Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, used a technique called lesion network mapping, which uses the location of surgical brain disruptions to reverse-engineer which networks in a healthy brain support a given psychological trait. Analyzing 88 patients who underwent brain tumor surgery, the team measured self-transcendence before and after each procedure and traced each disruption to its broader brain circuit using connectivity data from 1,000 healthy participants.
The derived network had a clear structure with two poles, one that constrains self-transcendence and one that supports it. Regions in the back of the brain’s midline, well known for their role in self-focused rumination and internal chatter, appear to act as a functional brake on transcendent experience: when surgical disruptions reached their connectivity, patients became more transcendent. These are also the regions most consistently quieted during contemplative practices. A second set of regions, including areas in the brainstem and frontal midline, showed the opposite pattern, and their disruption was associated with decreased self-transcendence. That the seat of transcendent experience reaches into such primordial neural territory is, senior author Michael Ferguson, Ph.D. says, “astounding,” speaking to how deeply the orientation toward the sacred is wired into human beings.
The network was tested against three independent bodies of evidence. Brain imaging studies of people experiencing compassion, a virtue central to virtually every major religious tradition, activated regions within it in the predicted direction. So did neuroimaging studies of ketamine, which reliably shifts the sense of self at therapeutic doses. And a brain stimulation study targeting the posterior midline region directly produced measurable changes in participants’ experience of selfhood. All three pointed to the same circuit by entirely different methods.
The research does not seek to explain away spiritual experience but to understand its neural substrate, and in doing so, to take it seriously as a dimension of human life the brain is built to support. Researchers studying contemplative practice, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and the neuroscience of compassion, who have long worked in parallel without a shared framework, now have a common circuit to orient around. Clinically, the findings suggest that brain stimulation treatments in widespread use for depression may be engaging self-transcendence as part of their mechanism of action.
The deeper implication may be simpler than any clinical application. The brain, the data suggest, is organized in part around the capacity to move beyond itself. That science and the traditions arrive at the same observation through such different paths may itself be worth pausing on.
Publication Details
Title: A network for self-transcendence derived from patients with brain lesions
Authors: Morgan Healey, Yaser Sanchez-Gama, Mengyuan Ding, James Tanner McMahon, Chase Bourbon, Rumaisa Jesani, Ginger Atwood, Brian Lord, Jay Sanguinetti, Judson Brewer, David Vago, Shan Siddiqi, Franco Fabbro, Cosimo Urgesi, Jared Nielsen, Michael Ferguson
Institution: Neurospirituality Lab, Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, Brigham andWomen’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.24.713239v1
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Contact:
Morgan Healey
The Neurospirituality Lab
morgan@neurospirituality.io
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