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The Word We Stopped Saying: What a Soul Might Actually Be

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There is a word almost nobody says in a hospital. It survives comfortably in song lyrics, and in eulogies, and in the sort of late conversation where people admit things they would not admit at noon. But say soul in a clinical setting and the temperature in the room drops half a degree. Everyone finds something interesting on the floor. Among those of us who work with brains and nerves for a living, the word carries a faint odor of the attic. It sounds like something our grandparents used before the scanners got good. And yet I keep meeting moments in my clinic where I have no other word available. A patient sits across the desk from me. The numbers explain a great deal and somehow not the main thing. The imaging is a map of territories, and the person in front of me is not anywhere on that map. I have never found a better name for what is missing from it. Part of the trouble is that the word has been handled badly for a very long time. For centuries it has been squeezed into one ...
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The same prayer, the opposite hormone: on which God you are praying to

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Two patients, on the same afternoon, with more or less the same problem. Both told me, without being asked, that they prayed every day. The first woman said it the way you might mention that you walk in the mornings. When she talked about her prayer her shoulders came down an inch. The second woman said it with her jaw set. She prayed the way a person files an appeal — carefully, on time, in the correct form, aware that a failure of procedure might count against her. Her blood pressure that day was higher than it had been at any previous visit, and she apologized for it. For most of my career I filed that difference under temperament. Some people are calm and some are not, and faith gets poured into whichever vessel is already there. I am no longer sure that is the whole of it. There is a small, awkward, occasionally overstated body of research suggesting that those two women were not only in different moods. They may have been in different physiologies. The cardiologist they...
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Six breaths a minute: what a rosary does to an anxious body

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Suppose there is a rosary in your hand. At first it feels awkward. You say the same prayer, and then say it again. Ten Hail Marys make a decade, and there are five decades. Somewhere around the twentieth repetition your reason begins to file a complaint. What is the point of this? If once, sincerely, would do, why fifty times? To a modern ear tuned to efficiency, it sounds like pure waste. We were trained to make the point once, cut the redundancy, and treat a repeated sentence as laziness. Telling such a person to say the same prayer fifty times is nearly a provocation. And yet the secret of the rosary is hidden in exactly that inefficiency. The repetition is not trying to deliver meaning. It is trying to put to sleep, briefly, the part of us that weighs meaning. Set the complaint down and move the beads. Something shifts. As the words grow familiar, the burden of parsing them drops away and rhythm rises in its place. One phrase on the breath in, the next on the breath out. The f...
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The pain that came first: what trauma and addiction ask of us

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A man in his fifties came to my clinic with headaches he had carried for three years. The imaging was clean. The bloodwork was clean. He had been through the standard workup twice already at other hospitals, and he recited it to me the way people recite an address they have given too many times. Near the end of the visit we came to the line on the intake form about alcohol. He gave me a number, paused, revised it upward, paused again, revised it upward once more, and laughed at himself. I asked him when the drinking had started to matter. He gave me a year. Earlier in the visit he had mentioned, almost as an aside, a scar on his forearm and the accident that put it there. Same year. The headache was real. I want to be clear about that, because patients with headaches spend half their lives being told their pain is imaginary. But sitting there with his chart, I had the strong sense that the headache was the smallest thing he had brought into the room. For most of the last century, ...
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The Door That Chemistry Opens: Psychedelics and the Neuroscience of Mystical Experience

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She had already asked me everything a patient asks about a new cancer diagnosis — staging, prognosis, what comes next. Then, just as her hand was on the door, she turned back. "Doctor," she said quietly, "I read that a single dose of something can take away the fear of dying. Is that real? Could someone like me try it?" I did not have a prescription to offer her. But the question stayed with me, because it was really two questions folded into one: a question about a molecule, and a question about what waits on the other side of fear. Neuroscience has begun to answer the first. The second is older than any laboratory. In 2016, research teams at Johns Hopkins and New York University published, almost simultaneously, trials in which patients facing life-threatening cancer were given a single carefully supervised dose of psilocybin, the active compound in certain mushrooms. The results were striking: depression and anxiety dropped sharply, the dread of death eased...
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Free on Kindle, August 26-30: The God Neuroscience Found

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From August 26 through August 30, 2026 , the Kindle edition of The God Neuroscience Found: A Neurotheology of the Embrace from Behind is free on Amazon . Why this book exists I am a neurologist before I am a writer. For twenty-five years I have read scans, examined patients, and sat with families in the last hours. The brain is the most honest organ I know. It does not flatter the clinician, and it does not flatter the believer. This book is what I have been able to say, quietly, after watching both the imaging and the dying — and after noticing that the two have more in common than either field admits. What is inside Andrew Newberg's SPECT scans of Franciscan nuns in centering prayer — the parietal cortex dimming as the frontal lobes brighten, the boundary of the self softening. The measurably thicker prefrontal cortex of long-term meditators. Speaking in tongues, and the quieted intentional-control network. Roughly four added years of life, on average, among people embedded in a...
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Ninety-nine degrees: what the brain does in the moment a life turns

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There is a kind of suddenness that neurologists are trained to fear. When a patient tells me something happened all at once — the weakness, the drooping face, the loss of speech — I immediately start thinking about blood vessels. In my clinic, sudden usually means something tore or something clogged. But there is another kind of suddenness, and I have never known how to chart it. A man came to me for years with chronic headache. Fifteen years of it, and somewhere along the way the painkillers had quietly become part of the problem rather than the solution. I explained this to him at nearly every visit. He nodded at nearly every visit. Nothing changed. Then one morning he sat down and said, before I had asked him anything, "I can't live like this anymore." And from that week he did rebuild all of it — the medication, the sleep, the coffee, the way he carried his work home. Not gradually. From that week. What had I said that day that I had not said for fifteen years? Nothi...
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