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When President George Bush and the Congress of the United States designated the 1990s the Decade of the Brain, they not only recognized the tremendous advances being made in the neurosciences, but they also recognized that this new information speaks directly to a core question of our society: What does it mean to be human?A pluralistic society interested in the brain comes with its own goals, preconceptions, and values. The best way that our neuroscience can enlighten the most profound questions of what it means to be human is not to negate these goals, preconceptions, and values, but somehow to address them in light of unfolding knowledge.Neuroscience in the past twenty years has taken great strides toward helping us understand ourselves as linguistic beings. We have begun to explore new horizons of knowledge and potential therapy using transplants and grafts into the human brain. We are learning the nature and causes of severe depression and schizophrenia, which afflict a sizable proportion of this society. Such learning has implications for deeply held human values, and important transformations in our self-understanding are already resulting. For these reasons, and because of potential benefits to people close to us, we need good information and serious reflection on these topics.The Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) has taken the measure of the neurosciences midway through the decade of the brain in the form of two conferences titled "Knowledge Most Worth Having in the Decade of the Brain." The first took place at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the second comprised the 1994 IRAS Star Island conference. Zygoon is herein publishing versions of some of the papers presented at those conferences. The writers present conclusions from contemporary neuroscience that, when taken at their depth, may transform our understanding of what it H. Rodney Holmes is a research scientist at

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Religious experiences, including mystical states and experience of the divine, are the ultimate reality of human existence that demand an account. Eugene d'Aquili weaves together that account using paradigms of thought which historically have made mutually exclusive claims about the nature of religious experience. While pointing out the deficiencies of the theory from a narrowly scientific point of view, this paper recognizes that neuroscience, or any other solitary discipline, is incompetent to explain religion. This paper emphasizes the significance and truth of d' Aquili's holistic theory, a religious vision which itself explains science and philosophy.

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