ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, JAIR FERREIRA BELLAFACCE
Michael Ferguson, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, grew up Mormon and “quite religious.” Although his beliefs have changed over the years, he “couldn’t deny that there was something happening with those [religious] experiences that was and continues to be extraordinarily meaningful to me,” he says. “As a scientist, I can’t help but wonder what it is about these types of experiences that made them feel so rich and so profound.”
When Brigham and Women’s Hospital first made plans to open the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics a few years ago, Ferguson was on board to join as a junior faculty member and announced he wanted to study the neuroscience of religion. But the soon-to-be center director told him that first, he’d need to help develop and validate a new strategy for understanding cognitive networks, called lesion network mapping. The technique pinpoints how different ...
