About

Welcome to Neurotheology Notes.

My name is Dr. Tae Ho Guak. I am a practicing neurologist. For about thirty years I have sat with patients and their pain — headache, dizziness, stroke, epilepsy, and the slow diseases that erase memory and personality one thread at a time. Every day, in the clinic, I meet the human brain at its most fragile and its most astonishing.

I was also raised in faith, and I never left it. For a long time I lived in two separate languages — the precise language of neuroscience in the hospital, and the older language of faith in the church. This blog is where, after three decades, those two languages finally meet.

Here I write honest reflections about the place where the brain meets the sacred: what neuroscience really says about prayer, awe, near-death experiences, love, suffering, and the self — written by someone who spends his days inside real skulls and MRIs, and still believes. These essays draw from my book, The God Neuroscience Found.

Books by Dr. Guak

Dr. Guak is the author of more than twenty books. Closest to this blog are The God Neuroscience Found (neurotheology), The Arena of the Twenty-First Century, and the three-volume Catholic devotional God, the Saints, and Me (Volumes I–III). As a neurologist he has also written plain-language patient guides — Migraine NOW and the Plainly series on conditions such as vertigo, trigeminal neuralgia, essential tremor, peripheral neuropathy, and concussion. You can find all of his books on his Amazon author page.

A note

Everything here is personal reflection and general information at the intersection of neuroscience and faith. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for care from your own physician. If you have a health concern, please see a qualified professional.

Contact

You can reach me at dr.guak@gmail.com. Thank you for reading.

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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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The more I learned about the brain, the more I found God

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When I was younger, I assumed that knowledge and faith were on a seesaw. The more science you loaded onto one side, the higher belief would rise off the ground — until one day it floated away entirely. Learn enough, and God would simply have nowhere left to stand. Thirty years inside the human brain taught me the opposite. Here is the strange thing no one warns you about in medical school: understanding does not shrink the mystery. It relocates it, and usually it makes it larger. You finally grasp how a neuron fires — and behind that clean fact stands the question of how eighty-six billion of them, firing in the dark, produce the experience of tasting coffee, or missing your mother, or believing anything at all. Every answer in neuroscience is a door, and behind almost every door is a bigger room. We honestly understand less than one percent of the human brain. The more precisely we map that one percent, the more clearly we see the size of the ninety-nine. ...
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Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There

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Even in the silence, someone is there. Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There A neurologist remembers three patients, and the dawns he spent beside them Tae-Ho Guak, MD (John) · Neurologist Back to the dawn shift in the ER These days I see patients in an outpatient clinic in Bundang. But when I was first starting out as a neurologist, one of the things I did most often was assess a patient’s level of consciousness in the emergency room. “Open your eyes for me.” “Squeeze my hand.” “Can you hear my voice?” I would go through the prompts in a fixed order and note at which step the response came, then convert it into a number. That instrument is called the Glasgow Coma Scale. The numbers were added up and written into the chart as a single line: GCS 9. GCS 11. That one line settled the matter of a person’s consciousness. At two in the morning, again at four, I would repeat the same assessment once an hour. Back the...
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