The Brain Turned Toward God

What remains, even after the explaining.

A neurologist walks into the hardest question about consciousness in the company of the faces he has met over thirty years of clinic. From psychedelics and artificial intelligence to vanishing memory and the last breath, this book begins in the questions of today and sets side by side how an old faith and a new brain science each bear witness to the same reality. It does not set out to prove. It lays the two languages next to each other and shows, honestly, that they are not enemies.

We do not look for God in the brain. What we photographed was not God, but a brain during the time it was turned toward God. A person is larger than what gets measured. Something the numbers on a chart and the shadows on a scan never quite hold was always left over in those faces. Science says how. Faith says what it is turned toward.

The Brain Turned Toward God is the second volume of The God Neuroscience Found. Where the first book asked where spirituality lives inside the brain, this one goes into the deep: consciousness and its hard problem, the mirror neuron and empathy, near-death experience, memory and its loss, the psychedelic renaissance, artificial intelligence, addiction and recovery, and the moment of dying. Each chapter opens with a real question a patient or a reader has asked, follows the best current neuroscience as far as it goes, and then listens to what the Catholic contemplative tradition has long said about the same territory.

Tae Ho Guak, M.D. is a neurologist who has cared for patients with neurological disease for more than thirty years, exploring the place where brain science and faith meet. He directs Riche Neurology Clinic in Bundang, Korea. He is the author of The God Neuroscience Found: A Neurotheology of the Embrace from Behind (Volume I). Riche Books.