Neuroscience and Religion: the neurological research around the religious experience

Abstract

Since the case Galileo, science and religion opposed and often encountered because of their looks directions: one towards the world and the other toward another world. Currently, however, the neuroscientists advocate that can study from an objective point of view the religious experiences through methodologies of the neuroimaging and visualization in vivo of the brain activity. This paper intends to analyse if is possible to describe the religious experience with neurological terms. It seeks to indicate how the religious experience is treated continuously built and rebuilt through the implementation of various experimental and theoretical devices. The referential bibliography consists of a series of recent studies that tried to describe the neural bases of the religious experiences differ. The results indicate that the researcher can have access to the effects (brain, electrophysiological, behavioural) of experience, but nothing can to said of them if not confront this experience with the subject’s self-report. He only can build a formal mapping of the effects.