Mystical Experiences: Turning Off What Holds Us Back

Quieting our brain's default mode network enhances our perception of reality.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Our brain’s default mode network (DMN) acts like a mental filter, shrinking what we can see and feel.
• Meditation gradually stills our DMNs, unlocking deeper clarity and fullness of perceptions.
• Psychedelics swiftly loosen the filtering of the DMN, unveiling a potent yet momentary sense of oneness.

This post is in response to
Your Brain: What’s Going On When Nothing’s Going On? By The Mental Health Innovation Group

Mystical experiences, celebrated across cultures and epochs, are often described as transformative events of self-realization. Frequently cited as the most profound and meaningful in a person’s life, they are said to bring an intimate awareness of one’s true nature.

What causes—or allows—us to have mystical experiences? One significant factor is the default mode network (DMN), an interconnected set of brain regions that appears to “hold us back” from these states. Two of the most reliable ways to turn down DMN activity are meditation and psychedelics; to be clear, I recommend meditation.

Michael Pollan, in How to Change Your Mind, highlighted how researchers discovered that both meditation and psychedelics could decrease DMN activity. He recounts how psychiatrist Judson Brewer, conducting research at Yale in 2012, noted that the expert meditators’ brain scans he was studying, during mystical experiences, closely resembled the published scans of individuals undergoing psychedelic-induced mystical states. Both showed marked reductions in DMN activity.

The Default Mode Network: The Brain’s Gatekeeper

To understand how the DMN restrains our ability to experience mystical states, we must first examine its role. The DMN becomes more active when the mind is at rest—during daydreaming, recalling memories, or contemplating the future. It orchestrates self-referential thoughts, helping construct and maintain our ego and sense of self. It also plays a significant role in our experience of space and time.

Acting like the brain’s “conductor” or “director,” the DMN filters and organizes incoming sensory data, determining what reaches conscious awareness. It remains quite active even when we’re not engaged in external tasks, consuming a substantial portion of the brain’s energy. While crucial for maintaining individuality and coherent identity, the DMN limits and restricts the scope of our perceptions.

Quieting the Default Mode Network: Meditation and Psychedelics

Meditation—even among novices—has been shown to significantly reduce DMN activity, loosening its control and filtering function. In contrast, simply resting with closed eyes tends to increase DMN activity, often leading to mind-wandering and rumination. This highlights a key difference: Meditation physiologically reduces DMN activity, whereas “resting with closed eyes” can heighten it.

A hyperactive DMN correlates with anxiety, worry, and, in more extreme cases, psychiatric conditions such as depression, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Conversely, long-term meditators tend to exhibit reduced DMN activity and higher EEG coherence, even outside meditation sessions. Similarly, psychedelics suppress DMN activity, and during both psychedelic- and meditation-induced mystical experiences, brain scans show dramatic reductions in DMN activity, alongside increased global connectivity and higher EEG coherence. Notably, psychedelics’ “calming” effects on the DMN can persist for days or weeks, potentially contributing to the mood improvements and mental health benefits observed in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Meditation Versus Psychedelics: Different Pathways to Calming the Default Mode Network

While both meditation and psychedelics quiet the DMN, they do so differently. Psychedelics often trigger a rapid, intense reduction in DMN activity, followed by a quicker return toward baseline. In contrast, meditation generally produces a more gradual and sustained reduction, with DMN activity rebounding more slowly. Meditation also engages diverse physiological pathways, potentially explaining its longer-lasting impact on DMN activity and broader improvements in overall well-being.

In both cases, the decline in DMN activity coincides with enhanced connectivity among other brain regions—a hallmark of mystical states—often accompanied by a profound sense of interconnectedness.

The Reducing Valve: A Timely Metaphor

Aldous Huxley’s 1954 concept of the brain as a “reducing valve” seems to anticipate modern neuroscience’s understanding of the DMN. In The Doors of Perception, he proposed that our brains limit perception, funneling what he called “Mind at Large” into a narrow "measly trickle" that we can become aware of. This metaphor implies that our brains actively hold us back from perceiving reality in its fullness. If we “open” this reducing valve—by diminishing DMN activity—Huxley suggests we might glimpse a clearer, fuller experience of what lies beyond our usual perceptions and sense of self.

Based on this model, the DMN restricts us from fully experiencing and knowing objects of perception. Does this mean that when the DMN is turned down or turned off, the resulting perceptions more accurately portray what is really outside of ourselves? Meditation-induced and psychedelic-induced mystical experiences would seem to help us answer this question. They allow us to explore whether states of mind with significantly diminished DMN filtering produce perceptions that align with those of modern physics—the discipline tasked with determining how reality fundamentally works.

It turns out that descriptions of mystical experiences, however they are induced, are remarkably similar to how physics describes reality when we consider the perspective of each description. Physics describes reality in objective terms, while the experiencers of mystical states describe it in subjective terms. Both appear to be describing the same phenomenon from different vantage points.

Modern physics suggests that phenomena such as quantum entanglement challenge the classical notion of separability—the assumption that physical systems can be treated as wholly independent from the rest of the universe. And our everyday perceptions of time and space are also shaped, in large part, by how our brains construct reality. As Einstein wrote in 1955, “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”¹ Similarly, people who experience mystical states often report a profound sense of unity with the cosmos, described as transcending time, space, and ego.

Experiencing Reality as It Is: Tat Tvam Asi

The perennial philosophy holds that all major religious and spiritual traditions share a common metaphysical core, even if expressed differently across cultures. Vedic philosophy—an ancient example of this perspective—proposes that in each moment of perception, three elements are present: the experiencer (the subject), the process of experience (our brains and senses), and the object of experience.

In his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley highlights the Upanishadic phrase tat tvam asi (“Thou art that”) as a concise expression of this shared wisdom: The individual is one with universal consciousness. When the DMN (the “processing” function) is essentially suspended, the experiencer (the subject) seemingly recognizes the true nature of all objects: tat tvam asi. In other words, meditation-induced or psychedelic-induced mystical experiences affirm the realization of “Thou art that.” By reducing DMN activity, both practices appear to open a door to a deeper, broader view of our true nature.