V.S. Ramachandran: Brain Temporal Lobes and Mystical Experience

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran works in behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics and is professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate Program in Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. He has published books with popular appeal, including Phantoms in the Brain (1998), A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (2004) and The Tell-Tale Brain (2010). In these videos he presents a young man who experiences recurrent mystical experiences and feels intense beauty in these moments. Ramachandran hypothesizes a reason for the experiences, although tracing them to the physical does not prove the cause as physical and the experience as deluded. One can also observe that people without the young man's condition have had similar experiences and that a door opened into a greater reality that few ever glimpse.

Part One
Part Two