Three years ago, I agreed to accompany my children to a Nick Jonas concert. The appeal of the Jonas Brothers, and in this case only one of them, was unfamiliar territory. The concert happened to land on a particularly inconvenient day.
As I sprinted out of the hospital, my mind was filled with the “what if’s” and “should haves” about our work that day. After lengthy negotiations with my daughter at the merchandise stand, we settled in as Nick Jonas began. I found myself surrounded by thousands of young people all singing the same songs, swaying to the same rhythm, and participating in the same moment.
At first I felt like an impostor, as if I was attending a party I hadn’t been invited to. However, as the evening progressed, my thoughts of “me” shrank as I was absorbed into the intoxicating collective of the crowd. Bizarrely, it was Nick Jonas (now an unlikely permanent fixture on my playlists) who reminded me of an obscure phrase coined by a 19th-century sociologist – Émile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”.
He was describing how individuals who are normally preoccupied with their personal concerns get swept up into a kind of electric, communal intensity. For “collective effervescence” to occur organically, bodies need to be present, in the same space, dancing to the same rhythm. The function, according to Durkheim, is to restore the social bonds and shared beliefs that are eroded by the drudgery of ordinary life.
Such a state is a rare universal in human culture. Cave drawings displaying communal dancing, often around a fire, are found across centuries and continents. As a neuroscientist and practiced meditator, I’m familiar with the literature on ego dissolution.
My own research on the Shambavi Mahamudra Kriya, an ancient yogic meditation practice, found that it reduces activity in the “default mode network” (DMN), the circuit in the brain that is responsible for planning, daydreaming and self-talking. Meditation is not alone in this; astronauts, big-wave surfers and skydivers all experience their egos melting away during an intense state of flow. Without it, we couldn’t plan tonight’s dinner.
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