Why God Won't Go Away; Brain Science & the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg et al.

Andrew Newberg is a radiologist and instructor in religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He teamed up with his colleague there, psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili; and together they ran studies aimed at understanding the neurobiology of spiritual experiences. They located an area of the brain called the orientation area, which is associated with knowing where the body ends and the rest of the world begins, giving us a perception of where we are in space. When people who meditate reach a deeply spiritual state, the orientation area becomes quiescent and the meditator experiences a transcendent reality beyond the normal reality of our everyday experience. The authors believe that the brain's capacity for transcendent experience is the basis for mysticism which is historically found in religions and cultures across the globe; it is the neurobiological aspects of spiritual experience that support humankind's sense of the realness of God. This spiritual state is analogous to the concept being developed in today's quantum mechanics that "both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible an unanalysable." [David Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order]

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Do imaginative artists uncover the nature of human consciousness? According to Jonah Lehrer, they do -- at least in the field of neuroscience. His short and very thought-provoking book describes how the work of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf relates to the current understandings of mind and consciousness as revealed by the neurosciences. Lehrer describes how the work of some artists, originally rejected as jarringly modern, chaotic, or meaningless, can be seen as the artist's way of breaking down old thought patterns to establish new ones. It is as if they have had an intuitive insight into how our neurons and synapses work. I found it utterly fascinating.

Excellent book.