In Reply

SIR: We are surprised that Dr. Kozart fails to note that in our introductory circumscription of the topic of the neural substrates of religious experience we provided a broad formulation of the range of human religious experience with allusion to varied neural bases. We did then choose to focus on mystical-numinous experience for more intensive analysis. As Otto and other eminent post-Durkheim students of comparative religion have shown, adherents of totemic belief systems, atheistic meditation, and other nonsupernatural religions do often report subjective experiences of contact with ultimate reality, with a mysterium tremendum.^1,2 While demarcation of the sacred indeed varies widely across cultural systems, the experience of contact with the sacred varies less so. When apprehending the holy (whether natural or supernatural), individuals often have internal numinous experiences that, we would argue, are brain-based.

In place of mystical-numinous perceptions, Dr. Kozart would have the distinctive mark of religious experience be “membership within a socially distributed belief system.” We do not find this a helpful criterion. By this token, all aesthetic, legal, scientific, mathematic, and athletic beliefs, indeed all social transactions, would count as religious experience.

Dr. Kozart closes by advocating an idiosyncratic, and baneful, variant of dualism. He suggests that cultural influences and neural influences upon subjective experience are completely dissociable, and furthermore that cultural influences are always good and authentic and neural influences always bad and inauthentic. He specifically argues that alterations in brain physiology can only be associated with religious experience that is inauthentic. The logical consequence is that the only genuine religious experience is one that has no associated brain activity whatsoever. In making this mistake, we risk impoverishing the genuine experiences of our patients, and of ourselves. Brain activity does not contaminate or invalidate our mental experiences; rather, it makes possible, and shapes, our mental and spiritual life.