Neurotheology Notes — "a neurologist on the brain and God"

There is a pattern in my own body that took me years to take seriously. For most of my working life as a neurologist I have kept a steady rhythm of volunteer work alongside the clinic — some of it weekly, some monthly. I will not say where, or with whom. The people I meet there did not agree to become material for a doctor's essay, and a physician announcing his good deeds is its own small vanity. So I will keep the personal part to one sentence: the day after I come back from giving someone my time, I am more alive than on an ordinary day. This should not be so. On those days I sleep less and work harder than usual. By every reasonable expectation I ought to arrive at the clinic the next morning depleted. Instead my steps are lighter, my breath is calmer, and the attention I bring to the first patient is deeper. For a long time I filed this under "the satisfaction of having done something good" and left it there. But a neurologist who watches his own body every day ev...

Holy Week, 1938. In the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, in France, a twenty-nine-year-old philosophy teacher sat through the offices and the Gregorian chant with a headache that felt, in her words, like a nail being driven through her skull. Simone Weil had lived with migraine for most of her life. She wrote later that in the middle of that pain, the beauty of the music, and something that came through the music, carried her beyond it. At the abbey a young Englishman showed her a poem by George Herbert called Love . She began reciting it like a prayer, especially when the pain was worst, putting her whole attention on each line. One day, while she was saying it, she wrote that Christ himself came down and took possession of her. I have treated migraine for a long time, and I want to be honest about what a headache like that is. A nail from the crown to the temple is not poetic decoration. A person in that kind of attack shrinks to a single point: their own head. Music does not get t...

A small request, and an easy one. From October 15 , both volumes of The God Neuroscience Found can be ordered by any bookstore or library in the world. They are now distributed through Ingram, the wholesaler that bookshops and libraries already use every day. Your local shop does not need a special account with me. It only needs the ISBN. Most books reach a shelf because someone walked in and asked for them. If these books have meant something to you, the most helpful thing you can do is ask for them where you live. The two books The God Neuroscience Found: A Neurotheology of the Embrace from Behind Book 1. Paperback, 336 pages, Riche Books ISBN 979-11-221695-0-8 The Brain Turned Toward God: Into the Deep (Duc in altum) Book 2. Paperback, 438 pages, Riche Books ISBN 979-11-221695-1-5 At a bookstore Show the ISBN at the counter and ask them to order it through Ingram. A Catholic bookstore near a parish or a cathedral is a good place to start. Independent shops can usu...

A man in his seventies has been coming to my clinic for Parkinson's disease for the better part of a decade. We have watched things leave him one at a time. His handwriting shrank first, then his sense of smell, then the easy swing of his left arm when he walks. Last month, almost as an aside, he told me which thing had not left. Every morning, before his first dose of levodopa kicks in and his hands are still useless, he sits on the edge of the bed and prays. He said it with a small shrug, as if he were reporting a reflex. In a way, he was. That shrug has stayed with me, because it points at one of the largest questions I tried to face in my book. Evolution is a ruthless editor. It keeps what helps us survive and reproduce and it quietly deletes the rest. Eyes stayed because light is real and seeing it keeps you alive. Ears stayed because sound is real. So why, after roughly three hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens, is there still a circuit in the human brain that makes a t...

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 ...

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...