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I asked Snyder whether Griffiths had caught the scent of a “God chemical.” He considered the question, then responded carefully.

“Seeking the locus of religion in the brain,” he said,“is by no means fanciful.”

Snyder clearly does not traffic in hyperbole, so let me elaborate on his response a bit: What he is saying is that neuroscientists may be able to find the divine spark in our heads. Is that big enough?

Snyder himself became intrigued by the serotonin system when he was a medical intern in San Francisco in 1963. It all began when a friend lost her job at the medical center at the University of California in San Francisco. As a parting gesture, she filched a bottle of LSD from the laboratory refrigerator. For the next few weeks, Snyder and his friends gathered together every Sunday to do “research.”

Those Sunday trips led this young agnostic Jew to a religious insight. Thanks to a glass of LSD solution, he could see through the eyes of mystics.

“I had this sense of being at one with the universe, which involves a loss of ego boundaries, such that you can’t tell the difference between yourself and the rest of the universe,” he said, looking slightly embarrassed. “Now, that doesn’t make any sense. But let me tell you, that’s what it feels like. And there’s a vast literature, where everyone who has a mystical experience—whether Christian mystics, Zen mystics, or whatever—they describe almost exactly the same thing.”

Snyder told me that scientists have long suspected that spirituality—or at least the farther edges of it, such as mysticism, hearing God, feeling the presence of the “Other”—might have something to do with neurotransmitters in the brain. One candidate is dopamine, the feel-good chemical involved in Ecstasy and “runner’s high,” although dopamine has received less attention in this context. Most scientists have zeroed in on serotonin and the serotonin system as the main triggers of transcendent experience.

Millions of Americans have an intimate relationship with serotonin: Prozac and other antidepressants are believed to smooth out moods by increasing the activity of serotonin in the brain. It turns out that LSD, psilocybin, peyote, and several other psychedelic drugs look very much to the brain like serotonin.When psilocybin enters the brain, it glances around for a place to camp out, and heads toward some very specific docking stations called serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. This is a close cousin to the serotonin receptor that Swedish doctors identified when they were looking for a “God gene,” or a genetic predisposition to spirituality.4

This fake serotonin is an unruly thing. Imagine a bunch of six-year-olds being let out of school, their mothers waiting in the playground. They burst through the door and make a beeline to their mothers, who give them a hug and take them home. One day, a bunch of imposter six-year-olds, virtually identical to the real children, run to the unwitting mothers, who then hug them and take them home. Those impos ters are psilocybin, masquerading as serotonin. The psilocybin excites the receptors and confuses them—or, in our analogy, the imposter children wreak havoc once they get home, upending furniture, knocking over lamps, smearing their chocolate-covered fingers on the walls. In the brain, the psychedelic drug creates visual and auditory perceptual changes, a sense of boundlessness, and the loss of time and space.

Having God on Tap

It is one thing to pinpoint the chemical or chemical system that reveals “God.” Now some researchers, like Franz Vollenweider, are exploring how a chemical acts on the brain to foment spiritual experience. Vollenweider is a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich who has made his life’s work understanding the chemistry of emotion and, more recently, spiritual experience. Happily for the science of spirituality, he lives in Switzerland, which has long permitted research using psychedelic drugs. That means thatVollenweider has accomplished what American researchers could not: he has observed