Word: scans
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...celebrate an art opening. Glasses of chilled chardonnay are served in the white-walled space as a battalion of gallery assistants respond to customer queries about abstract works in shades of blush and marigold. But make no mistake: this is not your average academic art exhibit. A quick scan of the attendees reveals lots of big hair, tight jeans and hints of rocker-girl décolletage. The sound system throbs with the refrain "Lick it up, lick it up." And perched behind a velvet stanchion, in an unbuttoned silk shirt that reveals just the right amount of furry, well...
...neuroscientists have pinpointed one section deep within, a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus, as particularly crucial to memory. Studies of patients with brain injury or disease have shown that the hippocampus is where new memories are formed and where recent ones are retrieved; like a librarian, it scans the brain's catalog of bygone information and brings appropriate material to the fore. (But a recent brain-scan study of 15 healthy adults at the University of California, San Diego, found that the hippocampus has less to do with memories from the distant past. It is vital to the recall...
Newberg: The real issue for us is to try to look at data and to interpret it carefully. If you're doing a brain scan of somebody who experiences being in God's presence, we have to know what that means. Basically, the scan is showing you what is happening in the brain when they have the experience. It doesn't necessarily reduce it to just what is going on in the brain, and it also doesn't necessarily prove that the person was actually in God's presence...
Sloan: Let me ask you a different question. Would it be meaningful if we did a brain scan of someone before and after eating cheese? I don't understand the value of developing beautiful images, very appealing, aesthetic images of brain scans and people engaged in various religious experiences. I don't see the value any more than imaging people while eating cheese...
Sloan: Fair enough, but there's a seductive appeal about neuroscience explanations, that there must be something significant here because you can see it in the brain scan. We're infatuated with neuroscience because of the very beautiful images that we can see, but the real question is, What do those images tell us that's of any value, whether it's basic science or applied...