The Spiritual Brain

Did God create the brain, or did the brain create God? Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are loath to consider -- that it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain. Scientific materialism is at a loss to explain irrefutable accounts of mind over matter, of intuition, willpower, and leaps of faith, of the "placebo effect" in medicine, of near-death experiences on the operating table, and of psychic premonitions of a loved one in crisis, to say nothing of the occasional sense of oneness with nature and mystical experiences in meditation or prayer. Traditional science explains away these and other occurrences as delusions or misunderstandings, but by exploring the latest neurological research on phenomena such as these, The Spiritual Brain gets to their real source. "A lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled." --Publishers Weekly Mario Beauregard is an associate professor in the Departments of Radiology and Psychology at the Université de Montréal (Canada), where he earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience. He has also held postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas Medical School and McGill University. Denyse O'Leary is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and blogger who specializes in faith and science issues. She is the author of Faith@Science and By Design or by Chance? An AudioFile magazine Earphones Award winner and Audie Award finalist, Patrick Lawlor is also an accomplished stage actor, director, and combat choreographer. His recent audio includes Grace Under Fire, edited by Andrew Carroll. "Lawlor is masterful." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer