Scientists find biological reality behind religious experience. ‘In a quiet laboratory, Andrew Newberg

takes photographs of what believers call the

presence of God.

The young neurologist invites Buddhists and

Franciscan nuns to meditate and pray in a

secluded room. Then, at the peak of their

devotions, he injects a tracer that travels to

the brain and reveals its activity at the

moment of transcendence.

A pattern has emerged from Professor Newberg’s experiments. There is a small

region near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person’s spatial

orientation, the sense of where one’s body ends and the world begins. During

intense prayer or meditation, and for unknown reasons, this region becomes a

quiet oasis of inactivity.

“It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship,” said Professor Newberg, an

assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work appears in

Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.’ Sydney Morning Herald