The commonsense view of religious experience is that it is a preconceptual, immediate affective event. Work in philosophy and psychology, however, suggest that religious experience is an attributional cognitive phenomenon. Here the neural correlates of a religious experience are investigated using functional neuroimaging. During religious recitation, self-identified religious subjects activated...
In the (re-)animated debate on consciousness we focus on three questions: Who has consciousness? What is its neuronal basis? What is its function? Regarding the first, we suggest that consciousness is exclusive to living organisms able to distinguish self from non-self. It may be restricted further to organisms who possess a repertoire of overt and covert behaviour which can be voluntarily...