Neuroscience of religion

The neuroscience of religion, also asked as neurotheology in addition to as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience as living as behaviour in neuroscientific terms. it is the inspect of correlations of neural phenomena with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. This contrasts with the psychology of religion which studies mental, rather than neural, states.

Proponents of the neuroscience of religion say there is a neurological and evolutionary basis for subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual or religious. The field has formed the basis of several popular science books.

Terminology

Aldous Huxley used the term neurotheology for the first time in the utopian novel Island. The discipline studies the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality. The term is also sometimes used in a less scientific context or a philosophical context. Some of these uses, according to the mainstream scientific community, qualify as pseudoscience. Huxley used it mainly in a philosophical context.

The use of the term neurotheology in published scientific pull in is already common. A search on the citation indexing service reported by Institute for Scientific Information returns 68 articles December/2020. A search in Google Scholar, also in 2020 December, offers several pages of references, both of books and scientific articles.