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eventually coaxed the nuns from their cloister to the brain scanner, he was effectively able to shoot a movie of brains in mystical union with God. The images told a complicated story: areas associated with positive emotion became a happy cauldron of activity; the circuits associated with unconditional love also lit up brightly and the parietal lobes, which determine the subjects’ physical boundaries—where they end and “God” begins—showed unusual changes in blood flow. Their brains seemed to be saying that the nuns felt themselves absorbed in something greater than themselves. In the end, Beauregard amassed sufficient visual evidence, in the form of brain images, to make the case that a mystical state was physiologically distinct from either an intensely emotional state or a resting state.

His research suggests that the brains of Carmelite nuns operate differently from the ordinary brain. In this, his conclusions matched those of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, with his Buddhist monks, and those of Andy Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, with his Franciscan nuns, Buddhist monks, and Protestant Pentecostals. Spirituality, it would seem, does leave an indelible fingerprint.

Now Beauregard’s question was: Would near contact with death trigger the same sort of neural activity? When he sat down and compared the brain reliving a connection to God in prayer with a brain reliving a connection to the “light” in a near-death experience, he made a remarkable discovery: a near-death experience unfolds in the brain in much the same way as a meditative union with God. It lights up the same areas and travels along the same neural pathways. One uses Google Maps, the other uses Yahoo!, but they visited many of the same points along the way.9

For example, Beauregard noticed that both for those who nearly died and for those who meditated, the part of the brain usually associated with “the subjective experience of contacting a spiritual reality” showed a spike in activity: the nuns sensed that they were in touch with God; the near-death experiencers felt they had contacted the “Light.” Another part of the brain associated with overwhelmingly positive emotions lit up. The same occurred in an area of the brain that involves unconditional love, both romantic and maternal love.

“It’s not surprising to see this type of activation during the NDE condition,” Beauregard theorized,“because love is one of the key components of this experience.”

Beauregard’s research suggests that both meditation and death rewire the brain in similar ways. It comes as no surprise that Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks can essentially sculpt their brains, fine-tuning them to access another dimension of consciousness. After all, they engage in rigorous mental workouts every day, praying and meditating for hours at a time. But what about Jorge Medina, who had never meditated a day in his life, and before his accident rarely darkened the doorway of a Catholic church? His brain gave him access to a spiritual or altered state of consciousness, just as theirs did—but without the decades of training. It seemed to occur in an instant, jump-starting his spiritual life.

Or, as Beauregard put it: “It’s like it will accelerate to a great extent the spiritual path for transformation.”10

Beauregard discovered another startling similarity between spiritual virtuosos and the survivors of death. Not only did similar parts of their brains light up when they reenacted their experiences, but they could both manipulate their brain-wave activity, almost like a key, to open the door to a spiritual realm.

I watched this occur at seven p.m. on July 12, 2006. Mario Beauregard, his research assistant Jerome, and I squeezed into a cold, windowless twelve-by-eight-foot room, along with Gilles Bedard, one of Beauregard’s subjects. The room was crammed with computers, some piled one atop another. Gilles sat on an ancient wooden chair, wearing a blue-and-red plastic cap with thirty-two small white buttonholes in it. Jerome bent his six-foot-three-inch frame over Gilles,