Review: Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion
Acknowledging the profound implications that recent research in the fields of neuroscience and psychology have for our understanding of human nature, Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown consider the consequences of this research in the context of religion in their book Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion (Templeton Press, 2009). Accordingly, the underlying question throughout much of this work revolves around the relationship between science and religion, a subject consistently enmeshed amidst highly charged controversy. Jeeves and Brown, however, begin with a survey of numerous historical examples lending credence to the possibility of amenable partnership and, more importantly, firmly reject the idea that scientific analysis is somehow able to undermine the significance of religion.
One of the most fundamental quandaries in theology and philosophy is the pernicious difficulty of using the mind to examine itself. The trickiness of inverting conscious attention back towards itself has caused countless philosophers (and their students) to throw up their hands in despair, and it hasn’t made life easy for modern-day consciousness researchers, either. But one scientist claims to offer a new hope: in his new book, Principles of Neurotheology (Ashgate, 2010), Andrew Newberg attempts to outline a bold, even revolutionary, strategy for unifying the study of conscious, subjective experience with the objective research of neuroscience.
Until recently, the standard position in the perennial religion vs. science wars was one of truce. Stephen J. Gould, the late evolutionary biologist, coined the phrase "non-overlapping magisteria" to formalize the terms of the truce: religion would confine itself to its concerns with the immaterial soul and science would concern itself with the nature of the material world. Neither discipline would or should attempt to interfere with the other. Andrew Newberg, M.D.'s new work, Principles of Neurotheology, challenges this division.
Mediums – people who say they can channel spirits or other supernatural beings to communicate with the living – often get a bad rap. They’re the subjects of debunking attempts, they’re accused of fraud, and most people think they’re just plain odd. But what if we deferred our judgments and tried to find out just what’s actually going on physically and neurologically in the act of channeling? A team of researchers in the US and Brazil did just that, finding that, whatever else is happening, mediums show some very unique patterns of brain activity. And even more interestingly, those patterns differ depending on the mediums’ amount of experience. 
You’ve felt it before: the embarrassed, self-conscious realization that you’ve just committed a major error, made a mistake when you should have been performing better. We all experience this unpleasant feeling. Measuring electrical activity in the brain, researchers call it “error-related negativity,” relating it particularly to a part of the midbrain called the anterior cingulate cortex. New research indicates that religiousness may reduce activity in this part of the brain, physiologically buffering people against their own mistakes. Most interestingly, the source of this effect may be the generation of meaning itself.