Antonio R. Damasio, University of Iowa neurology professor, studies fundamental mechanisms of cognition. He is the author of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harcourt, 2000).

Samuel Brinkman, neuropsychologist and adjunct psychology professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, has lectured on how studying the brain can lead to insights about morality, spirituality and personal responsibility.

Sohee Park, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has studied shamanism and the brain.

Matt Rossano, Southeastern Louisiana University psychology professor, studies consciousness, the evolution of the brain and religion and science. He teaches a seminar on religion and science.

Charles L. Raison, psychiatry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has studied Tibetan Buddhism’s effects on the brain.

George Graham, philosophy professor at Georgia State University, says it can be difficult to distinguish between signs of illness and religious insight, particularly when the purported insight raises doubts about the emotional health of the religious person.

John Haught, an emeritus professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that spiritual experiences are connected to the brain processes and dependent on them but not reducible to them. He says it is possible to distinguish between the chemical basis of experiences and the experiences themselves. Life and mind cannot be reduced […]

Rebecca Sachs Norris, religion professor at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., argues that religious states are transmitted and learned through the body, that particular qualities of perception and memory are necessary for this process and that neurobiology and cognitive science provide material to support this claim. Scientific and experiential perspectives, she says, can coexist. […]

The Rev. Nihal C. deLanerolle is a professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale University School of Medicine and chaplain-in-residence of the Episcopal Church at Yale in New Haven, Conn. A specialist in the analysis of human seizure foci, he believes that the dialogue between science and religion informs and clarifies assumptions of both endeavors.