Using a scientific study to disprove human experience is completely missing the point. It’s the same urge to say that, “Love is just a bunch of chemicals.” What exactly are you trying to achieve, when insisting to other people that the reality or unreality of their experience depends on whether they compare those experiences to scientific studies that 1. Were not written for them and 2. Wasn’t written by/for you?
Sometimes people act as though they are better able to ascertain truth in every domain because they have a purely scientific and objective view of cosmology. Yet often, people who have a more scientific view will also sit in mysterious wonder about their place in the cosmos. “I’m so small and insignificant,” or sometimes, "nothing I ever do will matter, because of entropy and time scales measured in eons rather than years. But that feeling can also carry with it a feeling of wonder and awe, it can feel peaceful and part of something unfathomably larger than ourselves. That feeling however, and what it means to us is unaccounted for in scientific experimentation. Does that make the feeling illegitimate? What if I have an urge to try and explain the sense of wonder to myself in a way that was not bounded by science.
Have you ever wondered whether or not a practical method for uncovering truth about our natural world, may not be the absolute measure of all phenomena? And that asserting of one ontology as absolute over others is the literal definition of hegemony?
I know you aren't trying to oppress anyone but the negative reaction to a pretty harmless observation comes off to me as superstitious.