May 7 issue – One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist-
who was spending a sabbatical year in England-saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then
Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated
like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are," he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished. I had been
graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things."

CALL IT A MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, a spiritual moment, even a religious epiphany, if you like-but Austin will not. Rather than interpret his instant of grace as proof of a reality beyond the comprehension of our senses, much less as proof of a deity, Austin took it as "proof of the
existence of the brain." He isn’t being smart-alecky. As a neurologist, he accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is mediated or created by the brain. Austin’s moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have dissolved, he reasoned,
certain brain circuits must be interrupted. Which ones? Activity in the amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats and registers fear, must be damped. Parietal-lobe circuits, which orient you in space and mark the sharp distinction between self and world, must go quiet.
Frontal- and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and generate self-awareness, must disengage. When that happens, Austin concludes in a recent paper, "what we think of as our
‘higher’ functions of selfhood appear briefly to ‘drop out,’ ‘dissolve,’ or be ‘deleted from consciousness’." When he spun out his theories in 1998, in the 844-page "Zen and the Brain,"
it was published not by some flaky New Age outfit but by MIT Press.

May 2 – Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain science and the biology of belief" by Andrew Newberg, M.D.

Since then, more and more scientists have flocked to "neurotheology," the study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality. Last year the American Psychological Association published "Varieties of Anomalous Experience," covering enigmas from near-death experiences to mystical ones. At Columbia University’s new Center for the Study of Science and Religion, one program investigates how spiritual experiences reflect "peculiarly recurrent events in human brains." In December, the scholarly Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted its issue to religious moments ranging from "Christic visions" to "shamanic states of consciousness." In May the book "Religion in Mind," tackling subjects such as how religious practices act back on the brain’s frontal lobes to inspire optimism and even creativity, reaches stores. And in "Why God Won’t Go Away," published in April, Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania and his late collaborator, Eugene d’Aquili, use brain-imaging data they collected from Tibetan Buddhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nuns deep in prayer to … well, what they do involves a lot of neuro-jargon about lobes and fissures. In a nutshell, though, they use the data to identify what seems to be the brain’s spirituality circuit, and to explain how it is that religious rituals have the power to move believers and nonbelievers alike.

What all the new research shares is a passion for uncovering the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences-for discovering, in short, what happens in our brains when we sense that we "have encountered a reality different from-and, in some crucial sense, higher than-the reality of everyday experience," as psychologist David Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it.

OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE

In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and
which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. In this way it differs from the rudimentary research of the 1950s and 1960s that found, yeah, brain waves change when you meditate. But that research was silent on why brain waves change, or which specific regions in the brain lie behind the change.

Neuroimaging of a living, working brain simply didn’t exist back then. In contrast, today’s studies try to identify the brain circuits that surge with activity when we think we have encountered the divine, and when we feel transported by intense prayer, an uplifting ritual or sacred music.