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

Point a camera at a red apple and today's artificial intelligence answers without hesitation: "a red apple." It reads wavelengths, draws boundaries learned from millions of images, and separates red from green, sometimes better than I can. So I find myself asking a question that no amount of accuracy seems to settle. Does the machine see red? I am a neurologist, and the question has a familiar shape. Philosophers tell of Mary, a brilliant scientist who knows every physical fact about color but has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. When she finally steps outside and sees a red rose, does she learn something new? Most people feel that she does. An AI, in a sense, is Mary in her room. It holds all the data about red. Whether the data comes with the feeling of red is not written anywhere in the data. You can memorize an entire cookbook and still never taste the soup. Telling versus undergoing Consciousness researchers separate the "easy" problem...

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...