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

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...

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...

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...

A patient of mine, a man in his late sixties, had been coming to my clinic for chronic tension headaches. The scans were clean. The medications helped, but only partly. Three visits in, almost as an aside, he told me something had been circling in his head for thirty years — a single episode from his youth he had never spoken aloud to anyone, and a faith he had quietly walked away from around the same time. I am careful, as a physician, about stepping past medicine. But that day I added one sentence to the prescription: find someone you trust, and say the thing out loud. A priest, a counselor, anyone. Two months later he came back. The headaches hadn't changed much. But he told me he had gone to confession for the first time in three decades. "I'm not cured," he said, "but the replay in my head stopped." The replay stopped. I have turned that phrase over many times since. For thirty years the same scene had apparently run on its own, an old re...

A woman in my clinic last month asked me a fair question. I had switched her from one preventive medication to another, and she wanted to know why. I told her: the first one was blunting her appetite, the second has better evidence in patients with her sleep pattern, and it comes in a dose she can take at night. Three reasons, delivered smoothly, in the confident voice patients like to hear from a specialist. She nodded and left satisfied. Driving home, I found myself wondering whether those were actually my reasons. Something in me had decided on that drug in the first thirty seconds of the visit — before the sleep question, before the dosing. The three reasons were all true. But had I reasoned my way to the choice, or made the choice and then, fluently and in good faith, assembled the reasons afterward? I wonder about this because of a set of experiments I have never been able to shake. In the middle of the last century, some patients with severe epilepsy underwent an operation that ...