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How does one measure the transcendent beauty of music, poetry, and paintings?

Last month Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD, Vice-chair of the Radiology Department at Indiana University, wrote a very thoughtful piece in The Atlantic entitled, “Sensing God and the Limits of Neuroscience”,

At issue: are the details of life-altering religious experiences associated with neurologic abnormalities? When one says that they experienced God, were they experiencing essentially nothing more than a state of altered electrical activity in a specific part of the brain?

Gunderman asks us to consider the transcendent beauty of the music of Beethoven and Mozart, and of the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, for example.

He concludes, “Ultimately, we cannot define the beautiful in strictly material terms.”

Informative, thoughtful and beautifully written; recommended reading: click here.