Neurotheology is the study of what happens in the brain when a person prays, meditates, or has a religious experience — and what that might tell us about religious belief and feeling. Researchers in this area put people in brain scanners while they pray or meditate and look at which areas turn quiet and which turn busy; some have also tried the reverse, using drugs or magnetic fields to see whether a spiritual-feeling state can be produced on purpose. It is a small and much-argued field. Some scientists say it explains where religious feeling comes from; some religious people answer that finding the brain machinery of an experience does not tell you whether the experience is true, in the same way that knowing what your brain does when you fall in love does not make the love fake. Both sides use the word, which is why it is worth knowing what it does and does not claim. This is a specialist, academic word — you will meet it in books, articles and documentaries about science and religion, not in conversation. It is sometimes called "spiritual neuroscience", and it is uncountable, like other subject names.

神經神學