The study of religion focuses on conscious experiences, but its methods cannot fully explain consciousness itself. Philosophy and psychology offer insights but lack access to the brain's neural mechanisms. Neuroscience has moved beyond behaviorism, and recent research suggests that the evolution of the brain's representational capacity may generate consciousness. These advances allow combining objective explanation with subjective descriptions, creating neurophenomenology. Lucid consciousness, a distinct state where awareness and content are differentiated, is a key category in Hindu and Buddhist traditions and serves as an ideal test case for this new analytic approach.
Scholarly definitions of religion typically involve awareness of a supernatural dimension, a phenomenon found in virtually all human societies since paleolithic times. Advances in neuroscience show that phenomenal experience is identical to brain activity, raising the question of why an evolutionarily adapted brain generates a sense of the supernatural. Psychology identifies three primitive interpretive modules that produce a sense of causative essence, located in brain areas whose output is experienced as non-material, like thought. These neurophenomenal essences correspond to three forms of otherworldly spirit essence found across religious history, forming the basis of the supernatural sense.
Activity in the dorsal attention network fluctuates with subjective reports of attentional control, indicating that this network reflects perceived recruitment of controlled attentional processes during spontaneous cognition. Activity in the default mode network increases when participants report being in a subjective state of internal mentation, but not when they report being in a state of perception. The study provides direct evidence linking fluctuations of resting-state neural activity to fluctuations in specific cognitive processes.