Sol Snyder on Seeking God in the Brain

It seems to be Guilford Pharmaceuticals day here. Sol Snyder, scientific founder of Guilford has this wonderful piece in the New England Journal:

NEJM — Seeking God in the Brain — Efforts to Localize Higher Brain Functions: “In seeking a general relationship between religious states, poetry, and music, Trimble ascribes all three to the right, nondominant side of the brain. He assumes that integration of the activity of the right-sided emotional brain with that of the left-sided analytic brain gives rise to the greatest intellectual achievements in the arts. I suspect that major advances in science, too, are the product of more than pure reason — in the finest scientists I have encountered, I have always detected a notable creative, artistic flair. ”

Can we be better scientists by practicing art? The specificity principle of general adaptation would suggest that scientists would be best practicing science like art.

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