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Eugene G. d'Aquili (1940-1998) was a research psychiatrist who specialized in studying members of religious communities (e.g., brain image scans).
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Experience is the process through which conscious organisms perceive the world around them. Experiences can be accompanied by active awareness on the part of the person having the experience, although they need not be. Experience is the primary subject of various subfields of philosophy, including the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of mind, and phenomenology.
The neuroscience of religion, also known as neurotheology and as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms. It is the study of correlations of neural phenomena with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. This contrasts with the psychology of religion which studies mental, rather than neural, states.
Sir Aaron Klug was a Lithuanian-born, South African-educated, British biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
Biomusicology is the study of music from a biological point of view. The term was coined by Nils L. Wallin in 1991 to encompass several branches of music psychology and musicology, including evolutionary musicology, neuromusicology, and comparative musicology.
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. The field is very much linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral neuroscience and the study of phenomenology in psychology.
A religious experience is a subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework. The concept originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of Western society. William James popularised the concept.
Scholarly approaches to mysticism include typologies of mysticism and the explanation of mystical states. Since the 19th century, mystical experience has evolved as a distinctive concept. It is closely related to "mysticism" but lays sole emphasis on the experiential aspect, be it spontaneous or induced by human behavior, whereas mysticism encompasses a broad range of practices aiming at a transformation of the person, not just inducing mystical experiences.
Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. is a neuroanthropologist known primarily for having co-founded a school of neuroanthropological theory called "biogenetic structuralism." Laughlin is an emeritus professor of anthropology and religion at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Transpersonal anthropology is a subdiscipline of cultural anthropology and transpersonal studies. It studies the relationship between altered states of consciousness and culture.
Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain.
A cultural universal, as discussed by Emile Durkheim, George Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Donald Brown and others, is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations. Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are "cultural" in the narrow sense, or in fact biologically inherited behavior is an issue of "nature versus nurture".
Cognized environment is a concept first introduced by the late anthropologist, Roy Rappaport (1968), in contrast to what he called the operational environment. Rappaport was an ecological anthropologist, like Andrew P. Vayda, and wished to contrast the actual reality and adaptations within a people's ecological niche – say, the existence of tsetse flies and their role in causing sleeping sickness among humans – with how the people’s culture understands nature – say, the belief that witches live in those areas that science knows is the habitat of the tsetse. Rappaport’s principal concern was the role of ritual in mediating the cognized and operational environments.
Neurognosis is a technical term used in biogenetic structuralism to refer to the initial organization of the experiencing and cognizing brain.
Andrew Newberg, M.D. is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences and the Director of Research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, previously an Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies and a Lecturer in Psychology in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rational mysticism, which encompasses both rationalism and mysticism, is a term used by scholars, researchers, and other intellectuals, some of whom engage in studies of how altered states of consciousness or transcendence such as trance, visions, and prayer occur. Lines of investigation include historical and philosophical inquiry as well as scientific inquiry within such fields as neurophysiology and psychology.
Charles Earle Raven was an English theologian, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. His works have been influential in the history of science publishing on the positive effects that theology has had upon modern science.
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to "a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of "being one with the external world as a whole," inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics. According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion. Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated himself or herself from other people and things.
Mysticism is the practice of religious ecstasies, together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, and magic may be related to them. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.
Wesley J. Wildman is a contemporary Australian-American philosopher, theologian, and ethicist. Currently, he is a full professor at the Boston University School of Theology, founding member of the faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, and convener of the Religion and Science doctoral program in Boston University's Graduate School. He is executive director of The Center for Mind and Culture, founding co-director of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, and founding co-editor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior. Wildman’s academic work has focused on interpreting religion and building theories of religious beliefs, behaviours, and experiences that acknowledge value in longstanding traditions while attempting to remain intellectually viable in light of the biological, cognitive, evolutionary, physical, and social sciences. He is an important figure in the religion and science field, along with scholars such as Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and John Polkinghorne.
Paul B. Sigler was the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. Major awards included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, HHMI Investigator status, and Guggenheim and Helen Hay Whitney Fellowships. He is noted for pioneering studies of Phospholipase A2 and trp repressor amongst many others.