A Taxi Ride Gives a Field Its Name

Cognitive neuroscience studies the neural systems that carry out specific mental processes, perception, memory, language and decision making among them, connecting cognitive psychology's account of what the mind does to direct evidence about what the brain is doing while it does it. The field's name was coined in 1976, when the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and the cognitive psychologist George Miller, sharing a taxi to a dinner meant to bring together researchers from Cornell and Rockefeller University who were starting to combine the two approaches, settled on the term for a subject that had until then lacked a name of its own.

The discipline's methods have since been turned directly on religious experience, recording what is measurably happening in the brain during prayer, meditation and reported mystical states, using functional imaging to identify which brain regions become active or quiet during a practiced contemplative state. That evidence describes the neural correlates of an experience without settling whether the experience corresponds to anything beyond the brain that had it, a question outside the discipline's competence, but it gives the atlas a controlled, replicable account of the measurable side of practices traditions themselves describe only in devotional language.