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The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience
Dr. Andrew Newberg
The Spiritual Brain is a 24-lecture Great Courses set (2012) in which neuroscientist Andrew Newberg takes viewers into the field he helped pioneer: neurotheology, the study of what happens in the brain during prayer, meditation, ritual, and mystical experience. Newberg, a physician and researcher who has scanned the brains of meditating monks and praying nuns, is careful and even-handed—he isn't out to prove or disprove God, but to map the biology of belief. Across the lectures he explains what imaging reveals about religious states, why the human brain seems built for the spiritual, and where the science runs up against its own limits. Delivered with a clinician's calm rather than a debunker's edge, the course speaks to anyone curious about the meeting point of mind, medicine, and meaning—believers and skeptics alike—without asking either to surrender their position.
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The author
Dr. Andrew Newberg is an American neuroscientist and physician, a director of research in integrative medicine and one of the founders of "neurotheology." His imaging studies of meditators and people in prayer made him a leading, and unusually measured, voice on the biology of religious experience.
The book
This is a Great Courses production—twenty-four recorded lectures with a printed guidebook, issued by The Teaching Company in 2012. Newberg surveys what brain science can and cannot say about spiritual states, drawing on his own scanning research and the wider literature on consciousness, ritual, and belief.
How to watch it
As a guided tour rather than an argument. Newberg's strength is balance: he treats religious experience as a real phenomenon worth studying scientifically, without reducing it to mere neurons or inflating it into proof.
For more context
Pairs with Newberg's trade books, including Why God Won't Go Away and How God Changes Your Brain, which cover the same terrain for readers.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Dr. Andrew Newberg
- Publisher
- The Great Courses (The Teaching Company)
- Place of publication
- Chantilly, Virginia
- Year
- 2012
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Course guidebook + 2 DVDs
- Shelf
- Science
- Location
- Maine
Set includes the course guidebook and 2 DVDs.