Science has only just begun to look, and its findings so far are mixed. Therapeutic Shamanism understands a journey as a deliberate shift from left-brain to right-brain ways of perceiving, helped by the drum, and its books describe the journeying state as rich in theta brainwaves; some brain studies of drumming support a link with theta, others find different changes altogether. Whether brain activity explains the journey, or simply accompanies a visit to real places, is left to each person’s own experience.
What does Therapeutic Shamanism teach about the brain in journeying? #
That a journey is a deliberate act of moving away from left-brain thinking and into creative right-brain allowing. The left hemisphere is hard-wired to perceive and process ordinary, everyday reality: facts, logic, what the five senses can observe, and the sense of being a separate self. The right hemisphere is hard-wired to perceive non-ordinary, shamanic reality: feelings, intuitions, imagery, art, music and imagination, and the sense of interconnection. Travelling in the interconnected web is what the right hemisphere is made for.1
In modern, “civilised” people the left brain has become strongly dominant and largely suppresses the experiences of the right, whereas the brains of hunter-gatherers seem to have been far more in balance, able to move attention from one to the other at will.2 So much of the difficulty of learning to journey is the left brain getting in the way. It likes to stay in control, and it resists at points such as the entrance to the tunnelTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this, because at some level it knows that beyond that point it will have to let go.3
The picture of a ‘left brain’ and a ‘right brain’ is itself debated amongst neuroscientists; the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist holds that the two hemispheres attend to the world in two different ways. See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
What does the drum do to the brain? #
It is played at a steady beat of roughly four beats a second, and shamanic drums are tuned to give many overtones and undertones, which the brain has trouble processing. The brain starts to fill things in and ‘make things up’: people begin to hear chanting, pipes, birdsong or other drummers, and the senses cross over. The shamanic drum is a finely crafted piece of technology, refined over thousands of years.4 The books describe the shamanic state of consciousness itself as characterised by high levels of theta brainwaves, the brainwaves associated with creativity and spirituality.5 See What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying?
What have brain studies found? #
Different things, from a small number of studies. On the theta side, the psychologist Andrew Neher reported in the early 1960s that the brain’s electrical rhythms follow a drumbeat, and Melinda Maxfield’s doctoral study of 1990 found theta increasing in people listening to drumming at about four to four and a half beats a second for around a quarter of an hour. Neher’s studies were later criticised because his participants moved during the recordings.6 Most recently, the neuroscientist Yoel Gordon and colleagues found in 2026 that people’s brains tracked a four-beats-a-second drum rhythm in the theta range, and that those whose brains tracked it most strongly reported the strongest altered states.7
Not every study agrees. Konopacki and Madison, recording people listening to shamanic drumming in 2018, found almost no theta at all.8 Emma Huels and colleagues compared twenty-four experienced shamanic practitioners with twenty-four people new to it, and found that during drumming the practitioners showed more gamma activity, a much faster rhythm, linked to visual changes in their experience, and no rise in theta; the practitioners’ altered states scored as high as, or higher than, those of volunteers on psychedelics, yet their brain changes differed, suggesting a distinct state of its own.9 An earlier brain-scanning study by Michael Hove and colleagues, of fifteen practitioners, found greater connection in brain networks linked to inward-directed thought during trance, and less in the hearing pathway, as if the repetitive drumbeat were filtered out so that attention could turn inwards.10
Instructions matter too. In a study by Bruno Gingras and colleagues, people new to journeying who heard drumming with shamanic instructions reported heaviness, a slowing heart and dreamlike experiences more often than those who heard the same drumming with relaxation instructions, though their stress hormone fell by the same amount.11 The research is young, the studies are small and use different methods, and no single picture has emerged.
What does Michael Winkelman say about the shamanic brain? #
The anthropologist Michael Winkelman holds that the altered states used by shamans the world over reflect a basic feature of the human brain. In his model, which he calls the integrative mode of consciousness, these states are “typified in theta wave patterns that synchronize the frontal cortex with discharges from lower brain structures”, bringing older parts of the brain into play with the newer ones; drumming, chanting, fasting, dancing and psychoactive plants are among the many ways in.12 His work treats shamanism as a natural human capacity, not a pathology, and Therapeutic Shamanism draws on his cross-cultural research elsewhere, on why hunter-gatherers generally did not experience possession. See What is shamanic ecstasy, or soul flight?
His brain model has its critics. It leans on an older picture of a layered brain, with ancient structures topped by newer ones, which many neuroscientists now regard as too simple.13 And the theta pattern at its heart has not been found in every study of practitioners, as the gamma findings above show. Therapeutic Shamanism parts from such models at a further point. Explaining the journey entirely as brain activity is only one of two possible answers; the other is that the shamanic realms are real, and the journeyer really does travel there.
Does brain activity mean the journey is all in the head? #
Not necessarily. What people experience in a journey might be a product of the brain’s wiring, subjective and all in the mind; or the shamanic realms might be real, objective places. Shamans are clear that what they experience is no figment of the imagination, and the more people journey, the more they find it goes beyond any personal imagination.14 Brain studies record what happens in the body of someone who is journeying; they do not by themselves settle which answer is right. Shamanism rests on direct experience, so the question is left to each person’s own journeys. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
