Searching for God in the Brain

Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith

By David Biello

The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.

Read the full article on Scientific American. They are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). What do you think? Are we going to get to a place like in star trek, where they mapped the brain's activities and knew how things like religion and faith work? Science will continue to surge forward and tools like fMRI are astounding and archaic at the same time. While we are gaining new insights into how the brain functions, I still think we are centuries aways from truly understanding our brain.

And our cynical world will take even longer to accept it as truth, if ever. Do you think that religion would die is we proved that god(s) are just a chemical reaction?