Meditation and speaking in tongues: the surprising similarities between two spiritual practices

Do the world’s religions and contemplative traditions send people to the same place – compassion, bliss, awe, a sense of God, awareness, or the universe?

We conducted a study that asked a smaller version of this question

As scientists with a research focus on brain science and spirituality, we ask whether people from very different spiritual traditions – Buddhism and Christian Pentecostalism – use their bodies in similar ways when they’re in intense contemplation

To make this concrete, let’s play a game. Consider the following quote and ask if it sounds like a person engaged in ecstatic Christian prayer – speaking in tongues – or someone in a deeply quiet Buddhist meditative state known as jhāna

I let go of everything … It feels like you’re falling. The first few times that happened to me, it was terrifying. I like to call it ‘slipping upward’ because it feels like a lifting to me…

It feels like a constant invitation to let go of more control, and the more control I let go the more powerful an experience it is … The more I let go, the lighter I feel…

Can you tell which is speaking in tongues and which is jhāna? The first was meditation; the second was tongues. If you got it wrong, don’t worry – even experienced contemplative practitioners identify them correctly only about half the time

Our research suggests that these traditions, which on the surface appear so different, may, in fact, share a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. And further, that this mechanism might be a tool for self-transformation

Meditation and tongues

It’s true that jhāna meditation and speaking in tongues could hardly look more different

Jhāna is an ancient Buddhist practice from India, centred on intense concentration. Speaking in tongues is a Christian prayer practice in which worshippers utter a fluid string of speech that doesn’t have a semantic meaning

In jhāna, the body is still. You sit. You do not move. From the outside, almost nothing seems to happen. The practice is deliberate, austere, and precise. Attention is guided – patiently and repeatedly – back to a single object, often the breath. Gradually, attention gathers. The mind steadies. A sense of ease appears – sometimes warmth, sometimes a spreading pleasure

In deeper states, meditators describe absorption so complete that the sense of acting or choosing dissolves into something quieter

Tongues prayer unfolds in a very different register. Sound spills out. Voices rise, overlap, and break apart. Bodies sway or tremble. Some people weep; others laugh. Some rock rhythmically. People may dance

For those who pray this way, they feel the prayer is not produced by them – it moves through them

Placed side by side, these practices appear to belong to different worlds. If you only watched, you would not confuse them. Yet when we listened closely to how practitioners described what it felt like from the inside, the contrast began to soften

For this study we conducted in-depth interviews with 116 practitioners and then mapped their responses against neuroscience theory. The work continues. We are currently exploring the physiological (bodily function) side of the story to see if brain activity can be used to measure the pattern we observed at the level of experience

Across many conversations – with experienced jhāna meditators and long-time tongues practitioners – we noticed a recurring pattern. Attention gathers. Feeling intensifies. And then, at some unpredictable moment, something releases

A familiar rhythm

Whether in stillness or fire, the rhythm was familiar. The inner sequence was strikingly similar. Attention to the act of practising feeds arousal of the senses and emotions. Arousal, in turn, stabilises attention. Together, they facilitate the sense of reduced effort – until effort is no longer required at all

A jhāna meditator told us:

I set the intention. Then I let go

She described it as falling upward – quiet, buoyant – as though the experience were happening through her

A tongues practitioner said:

The more I let go, the stronger it gets

He spoke of shaking, of tears, of feeling small – of God taking over

In both practices, attention and feeling work together. Intensity does not disrupt focus; often it sharpens it. Focus then allows the rest of the mind to let go. In the wake of surrender, both groups described emerging clarity, a sense that the process renewed their minds

The science

We began to suspect that both practices rely on a simple loop – one that aligns well with predictive processing, a dominant framework in today’s neuroscience. It suggests the brain uses predictive models to perceive and navigate the world. We think that people, instead of seeing everything as fully new, have maps from their previous experience that allow them to recognise that, for example, a chair is for sitting on and that a creature with arms and a beard is a person

The loop might work like this: attention is placed and held on something – the breath, God. As attention stabilises, the object grows vivid. That vividness brings pleasure, as the brain enjoys the experience of clarity in its effort to predict sensory input

Pleasure, in turn, makes attention easier to sustain. What begins as effortful becomes easier. Control gives way to momentum and attraction. At a certain point, practitioners report that their familiar sense of “doing” falls away as what we call the Attention–Arousal–Release Spiral develops and deepens

Finally, surrender enables a renewal, as their minds are refreshed by a momentary release of prior patterns of thought

Read more:
How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

Seen this way, our analysis argues that jhāna and tongues might be culturally distinct tools acting on the same human mechanism – a spiral of attention, arousal and release that enables renewal

Why this matters

At a moment when religion is often experienced as a polarising force, this kind of research might offer a window into a shared foundation that we can all use to shift how we experience the world