Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

I still remember my first Thanksgiving dinner. It was in 1958, the year in which I arrived in Saint Louis for my otological training. I was invited by Dr. Walter Covell, my teacher of otolaryngological anatomy, who would later become my adviser when I applied for my Master’s degree. I had no idea of what was the Thanksgiving day. Nowadays many people in Brazil commemorate it, but at that time it was totally unknown to me. And of course I tried to find out what it was all about. I know that there are many doubts concerning the historical veracity of the legend, but the attempts to modify it are equally difficult to prove and are definitely less satisfying to our souls than the original one. It all began with a harvest. Harvest festivals are not uncommon, but they happen immediately after the harvest. This one is different. We celebrate one specific occasion that happened a long time ago.  It seems that the Pilgrims had had some bad harvests. And since they were attemptin...

In 2008 I received a letter from Prof. Nina Azari, inviting me to collaborate on a project that she had just devised. I do not know her and I have no idea why she chose me as one of the many persons that she invited to join her project. At that time Dr. Azari was working at the Department of Psychology of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. She is now a part of the science faculty of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a specialist in cognitive neuroscience and psychology of religion. She uses psychological methods and medical imaging technology to study things like religious experiences, consciousness, belief and perception in her volunteer subjects. In one of her best known studies she used positron emission tomography (PET-Scan) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious controls.  Each subject had go through six different situations: 1 - stay resting for a few minutes; 2- read the first verse of the 23rd p...