Mapping the Mind: Spiritual Experience
"The fact that we seem to have a religious hot-spot wired into our brains does not necessarily prove that the spiritual dimension is merely the product of a particular flurryof electrical activity. After all, if God exists, it figures He must have created us with some biological mechanism with which to apprehend Him..."
In Mapping the Mind, Rita Carter covers the work of particular neuroscientist, Michael Persinger - he apparently claims to have reproduced an experience of "spiritual transcendence" in people by stimulating portions of the temporal lobes.
A Wired contributor, Jack Hitt, has an interesting article (This is Your Brain on God) in which he describes Persinger's work and his own experience participating in the very experiment which was meant to invoke this "spiritual transcendence". He describes the encounter as follows:
When the door closes and I feel nothing but the weight of the helmet on my head and the Ping-Pong balls on my eyes, I start giving serious thought to what it might be like to "see" God, artificially produced or not. Nietzsche's last sane moment occurred when he saw a carter beating a horse. He beat the carter, hugged the horse while sobbing uncontrollably, and was then carried away. I can imagine that. I see myself having a powerful vision of Jesus, and coming out of the booth wet with tears of humility, wailing for mercy from my personal savior.
Instead, after I adjust to the darkness and the cosmic susurrus of absolute silence, I drift almost at once into a warm bath of oblivion. Something is definitely happening. During the 35-minute experiment, I feel a distinct sense of being withdrawn from the envelope of my body and set adrift in an infinite existential emptiness, a deep sensation of waking slumber. The machines outside the chamber report an uninterrupted alertness on my part. (If the researchers see the easily recognized EEG pattern of sleep, they wake you over the speakers.) Occasionally, I surface to an alpha state where I sort of know where I am, but not quite. This feeling is cool - like being reinserted into my body. Then there's a separation again, of body and soul, and - almost by my will - I happily allow myself to drift back to the surprisingly bearable lightness of oblivion.
Don't get your hopes (or angers) up - Hitt concludes his description of the experience with these damning words:
In fact, as transcendental experiences go, on a scale of 1 to 10, Persinger's helmet falls somewhere around, oh, 4. Even though I did have a fairly convincing out-of-body experience, I'm disappointed relative to the great expectations and anxieties I had going in.
The fringe described by Carter so matter-of-factly is a bit disconcerting. But the book is a good read - I find myself with butterflies and shortness of breath as I read about the billions of neurons that comprise the brain and the myriad and mystery enshrouded therein.
6:01:39 PM 
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