What happens in the human brain when someone goes into a trance? For centuries, the Gnawa lila has been guiding people into this state in which the self loses its outlines, the body surrenders to the rhythm, and  something happens that is understood by the tradition as an encounter with the mluk—a phenomenon that modern neuroscience has only recently begun to describe. Neuronal Rhythms of Lila brings together three approaches to this phenomenon: ethnographic observation, neuroscientific measurement, and the lived experience of those who know the trance state from within. Zineb Majdouli, an anthropologist and author of  Trajectoires des musiciens gnawa. Approche ethnographique des cérémonies domestiques et des festivals de Musiques du Monde (2007), has for years been studying the ways ritual trance changes when it moves out of the domestic setting of the lila onto the festival stage, considering how much of its original function remains and what changes under the gaze of a paying audience. The second voice on the panel comes from the field of neuroscience (name to be confirmed): the scientific viewpoint that explores the nervous system’s response to rhythmic stimulation, repetitive percussion, and hours of repetition—how the pulsing of the guembri and the qraqeb affects heartrate, breathing, and brainwaves and why certain frequencies and patterns bring forth related states across cultures and continents. The third voice belongs to practice: a member of Asmaa Hamzaoui’s group Bnat Timbouktou who knows the trance state not as an object of research, but as a lived reality, as what actually happens in instruments played, in voices, and in one’s own body. Moderated by Alaa Zouiten, the panel seeks not to reduce the mystery of this trance state into data, but to foster discussion between two forms of knowledge that would benefit greatly from exchange: the oldest experiences of the Gnawa and the most recent tools of neuroscience. Two ways of talking about the same process—and the question of what the one can learn from the other.