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by Shaunesse' Jacobs The following post is part of a special series emerging from Contemporary Issues in Neuroethics, a graduate-level course out of Emory University’s Center for Ethics.  Shaunesse' is a dual masters student in Theological Studies and Bioethics at Emory and her research interests lie in end-of-life care and religious practices surrounding death and dying. Are religion and spirituality authentic belief systems that have thrived for millennia because of their truth? Or are they simply constructs of the brain to help humanity cope with the unknown? With the advancement of science, can religion and science work together to understand humanity? What do religion and science have to say collectively that has not been said individually? These questions continue to be asked with each scientific advancement, and even more so now that neurotheology is beginning to develop as a sub-discipline of neuroscience. Neurotheology is generally classified as a branch of neuroscien...

By Stephanie Hare Stephanie Hare is a second-year PhD student studying neuroscience at Georgia State University . She is the recipient of the first 2CI Neuroethics Doctoral Fellowship and has research interests in psychiatry, law and the normative impact of neuroimaging research. You can connect with Steph via email at share1@student.gsu.edu or use her Twitter handle, @NeuroSteph . On September 20, Emory University hosted a book talk and signing with Dr. Heidi Ravven , author of The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences and the Myth of Free Will . Dr. Ravven received an unsolicited $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book rethinking traditional ethical frameworks and theories of moral agency. As a leading scholar on the work of Baruch Spinoza and Jewish philosophy, Ravven is perfectly situated to recognize socio-cultural assumptions regarding our beliefs about free will and agency, allowing for the consideration of alternati...

In a previous post , Kim Lang presented the views of several prominent neuroscientists and neurologists on spirituality and religion. With the knowledge that atheism is prevalent in the scientific community, she wondered how is it that some neuroscientists are nevertheless able to integrate their religious and scientific beliefs. One of the neuroscientists whose standpoint she surveyed was Michael Graziano , a Professor of Neuroscience at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Graziano believes that current research on the neurological basis of consciousness proves that spirituality is not only a natural tendency of humans, but also that its foundations are visible in the very structure of the brain [1] . Several questions arise from Dr. Graziano’s statement, and I will try to shed some light on each. To start with, is neurotheology actually studying spirituality, religion, or both? What is the difference between the two? The conceptual separation between the two terms i...

On December 13, 2013 the Marcus Autism Center and the Atlanta Autism Consortium co-hosted a mini-symposium looking at the role of faith and religion in the lives and well-being of individuals living and working with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Organized by Marcus psychologist Dr. Samuel Fernandez-Carriba and Georgia State professor Dr.  Anne-Pierre Goursaud the event, titled “Faith, Values and Autism,” included a panel of six individuals from a variety of faith perspectives and featured a presentation by Dr. Alfiee M. Breland-Noble on the development and implementation of faith based mental health promotion. This topic has important implications for neuroethics and neurodiversity , the perspective that autism and other neurological disorders are part of natural human neurological diversity that should be neither cured nor normalized. The religious or faith-based perspective of a family impacts how the presence of autistic traits in a child is framed. Some religions, for ...

By  Kim Lang Graduate Student, Neuroscience Emory University  This post was written as part of the Contemporary Issues in Neuroethics course  As scientists, we’re generally a skeptical bunch (I’ll leave speculation of whether that is a cause and/or effect of a career in science for the Comments section).  While 95% of the American public believe in a deity or higher power (83% believe in God and 12% believe in a higher power) [1], only 51% of surveyed scientists believe the same (33% believe in God and 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power) (Figure 1). [2] According to surveys, this discrepancy is nothing new.  In 1914, sociologist James H. Leuba found that 42% of the polled US scientists believed in God while 58% did not. [1,3]  In 1996, Larry Witham and Edward Larson repeated Leuba’s survey and found that 40% of scientists believe in a personal God while 45% do not 4 .  While the wording of questions can be critiqued [3], the overall...