Slate on the BrainDaniel Engber answers your questions.

Daniel Engber was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, April 26, to discuss this week's special Slate issue, Brains!, about the human brain and recent research, including looks at brain scans, what religion does to your neurons, mental workouts, and more. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Cleveland: What are the chances of finding a "religion gene" in human (or other species) DNA? Would that explain religious belief or Atheism? Thanks and keep up the great work.

washingtonpost.com: God Is in the Dendrites (Slate, April 26)

Daniel Engber: Dean Hamer identified his "God gene" by testing people's DNA and asking them how religious they were. It's easy to come up with some sort of answer if you set up your questions this way ... but I'm not sure how much we learn from this approach. Even if some combination of genes made someone more or less likely to believe in God, that might not "explain" anything. After all, there are probably a lot more atheists around Europe today than there were 750 years ago. Is that because the gene pool changed, or because of something else?

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Beautiful Silver Spring, Md.: I don't see how you can have a discussion of neuroscience without addressing the single greatest threat to cognitive abilities that most humans will ever face: Brain-eating zombies. When corpses self-reanimate and rise from their own graves with an insatiable lust for neural matter, it is scientifically documented (in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Folk Epidemiology) that those whose brains exhibit the highest levels of neuroplasticity exert the greatest attraction for the zombie menace. What does neuroscience have to say about balancing the desire for top cognitive function with the need to avoid forcible neuronectomy at the hands of brain-eating zombies?

Daniel Engber: This is surely one of those areas of research I alluded to above, when I said that scientists avoid studying topics that make them uncomfortable. Why don't you submit a grant proposal to the NIH?

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Sydney, Australia: I was going to ask you about Gingko Biloba, which I have been taking regularly for the past few years ... but I forgot what the question was! Sorry!

Daniel Engber: My sentiments exactly.

I'm signing off now -- Thanks again for all your questions, and keep an eye out for a few more "Brains!" pieces on Slate later in the day. One will look at the myth of "mirror neurons," and the other will investigate what happens to our brains when we hit 70 years old...

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