Brain scans to find the soul

The doctor asks the nun to begin her centering prayer. It's a Catholic method of prayer, goes back to the 14th century, a form of deep meditation. The nun sits straight, in silence. She closes her eyes and focuses on a sacred word, or small prayer. She "rests in God." A catheter dangles from her arm. After 45 minutes, the doctor injects her with a radioactive tracer. He lets her pray 10 more minutes as the tracer in her bloodstream wends its way through her brain. Then he leads the nun into his lab, has her lie down, and scans her brain. He's using a process called single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT. It's a common technique in nuclear medicine, used to photograph the brains of patients suffering anything from seizures to brain trauma to heart disease to Alzheimer's. The nun isn't sick. She's "on God." She's a person of faith donating the use of her brain to a scientist — Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania. Amid today's ideological struggles between people of faith and science, that kind of collaboration sounds heretical.

But Newberg is among a small group of doctors and scientists on a different track. They do not find science and faith incompatible. They are using sophisticated technology to hunt down and map the soul. Newberg, a professor of radiology and psychiatry, is not religious. He's Jewish by birth, but Judaism isn't a big part of his life. If a dying patient asked him to pray beside him, he'd do it. But he wouldn't lead the prayer. When his 8-year-old daughter asks him about God, he answers her with a question: "What do you think?" But he has searched for spirituality in the brain for almost 20 years. He has probed the brains of praying nuns, meditating Buddhist monks, and Pentecostals as they speak in tongues.