Once you begin to think of the mind as a process in the brain, it opens up so many interesting questions.

We know that specific skills and memories can be turned on and off via brain injuries, even personality can be altered through drugs that act on the brain.

If one admits that things like antidepressants work, it's a de-facto admission that the "mind" is in fact that wonderful & mysterious bit of meat in the skull. Otherwise, why not just cheer up!

If God is as real as the universe is (and not God-as-the-universe, I'm talking about the classic cloud-daddy) we are connected to God through the brain, just like everything else outside of our mind.

How cool to monitor brain activity during prayer! Of course, the "loss of self/ego" phenomenon is not new to people engaged in meditation, sports, music creation, or serious self-reflection.

I'm pleased to know that holy rollers and acid-heads have far more in common than either of them would dare admit.

Andrew Newberg's even-handed approach is a nice respite from both Neo-Christians damning us to hell and scientists belittling people who believe in God. Newberg is wise enough to admit that he doesn't know the answer. He bends over backwards to stay in the middle at times, bristling at use of the term "hard-wired" because it implies an external source doing the wiring, then in the next breath saying that the brain is "set up" in a certain way.

On the other hand Stephen Heinemann is quoted as saying that "the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd". I'll bet that if Mr Heinemann didn't know what a television set was and was shown one for the first time, he would examine it thoroughly, then call the concept of a television station absurd as well.

Is it possible that Newberg, via science, logic and reason, is approaching the development of a human soul? Is it possible that we may someday be able to achieve Krishnamurti's dream of action not influenced by the past? (I would argue that science is largely trapped in Krishnamurti's "prison of the past", as everything is predicated on something else and, therefore, potentially every bit as faulty as the lone potential flaw in any single theory or hypothesis). It is, at any rate, refreshing to hear a scientific thinker as he approaches don Juan's mesa, to which he helped Casteneda eventually travel, but from which Carlos had to make his leap beyond logic and reason and into the state where "...then I was alone." Free of the past. Free of all the constraints of the past, of science, logic, reason, religion, "cloud-daddy", all earthly attachments and, ultimately, nothing even the Self.

We may have been witness here to a confession similar to the one published by the original Rosicrucians in the 17th century, wherein nothing could possibly make sense to a "normal" person being driven solely by headcheese, but more like the speakers-in-tongues who leave the babbling, yakking carcass behind along with much of the brain, as they enter into their separate-if-seemingly-pointless reality. Newberg has made the most profound confession a man of science can possible make: that he doesn't know, that he can't explain, and that there may be something where nothing could possibly be.

The fear of a fall into chaos will drive many away from this path, but The Confession has already been made, already been read, already made a crack in the bulletproof shield of the mightiest religion: science. If you believe, let go. In this case, let go of the past. Hell awaits. So might heaven.

Steve Paulson is clutching at straws. Striving for a tone of thoughtful objectivity, he keeps letting the mask slip to reveal the eager believer beneath. Finding a neurological analogue of religious experience does not “show there's nothing delusional about spiritual or religious experience”; it says, as Newberg explains, nothing at all about the reality behind the belief. Nothing. At all. In question after question, Paulson worries about the meaning of words -- ‘God’, ‘spiritual’, ‘mystical’ -- without considering the possibility that they do not mean anything beyond the subjective, or showing the slightest awareness these words have no referents for those few of us in the ‘reality-based community’. And he writes “some larger intelligence -- God or some divine presence” as if he were making some kind of meaningful distinction -- Oh, you mean THAT divine presence; and here I thought you meant God...

Any scientific theory of the nature of religious credulity will also have to take into account those who are -- happily – immune to it. Martin Amis got it right recently when he wrote, in The Observer, “Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief -- unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses” and defined faith as “the desire for the approval of supernatural beings”. Salon seems to want to find those excuses, to judge from a number of recent articles. In a world where various more or less murderous theocracies -- not least the American one -- compete to threaten our safety, freedom and sanity, this may not be the best plan.

for the "hard wiring" for religion in the human brain has been ignored in the article.

Newberg's statement that the term "hard wiring" implies that someone did the wiring ignores the obvious: that "someone" clearly is evolution.

During the eons of the modern brain's development, the only explanations for the world were supernatural. For virtually all of the developmental time of the brain, superstition/religion provided the only explanations for famine, disease and knowledge of one's own mortality. Religious belief accompanied and influenced the brain's development at every incremental step from the get-go. It's no wonder that we are so receptive to religion: our genes are comfortable with it, and our brains reward it with pleasurable sensations.

The suggestions that proof of God may be revealed through neurological study, in fact, reveal the power of the ingrained human predisposition toward supernatural belief when they are preferred over more obvious rational explanations.

It is called art. It might be interesting to explore the connection between language and what happens in the brain during 'religious' experience. In each case, the experience would not occur unless the subject was using language. It might also be interesting to see if subjects experiencing art have similar brain activity.