Its full title was ‘Creating God in the Human Brain: RSMEs and Pulsed Transcranial Stimulation’.

That’s why I’m here.

He had read most of it, though when he crashed into mathematics two-thirds of the way through, he had skipped to the conclusion. The statistics he’d been forced to pick up for his degree had been hard learned and effortlessly forgotten; his brain now ceased to function if it encountered any kind of maths that involved Greek letters. The conclusion of her paper had been enough. He offers her a précis.

As I understand it you’ve used some kind of electrical stimulation of the brain to produce quasi-spiritual experiences in a number of subjects?

Her eyes drop; she seems about to have a side-conversation with the froth on her coffee.

I’m not keen on the term ‘quasi-spiritual’, she says, before re-engaging.

I’m fairly sure you used that term yourself. In the article.

She glances over to the door, pushed open by a sizeable student nodding to the beat of his headphones. Then back to Logan.

The editor added the quasi. Necessary to pass peer review. I find it rather sneery.

Sneery?

You don’t perceive it as such? Interesting. Armed with that information, do you realize I can immediately ascertain your position on the human soul? She skewers him with her eye. Tears a packet of brown sugar as though wringing the neck of a tiny paper chicken; dumps the contents into her coffee. Or rather onto, since the grains make a small glittery, taupe-coloured pile on her froth.

I’m surprised to hear a scientist even using the phrase ‘human soul’, he says. You are a scientist, aren’t you?

I’m a scientist of RSMEs, she says. It tends to come up in our work. It’s the human soul that’s under the scalpel.

Well, I’m not sure I have a position on it.

That’s the position I determined. Agnostic at the minimum.

Logan has begun to think about the price of his train ticket, the hours of travelling. She is young, this Dr Salmon, and perhaps not quite as serious an academic as he had imagined.

You think you invoked actual spiritual experiences?

She laughs.

Do you know what an actual spiritual experience is, Dr Logan?

I’ve never had one, if that’s what you’re asking.

The pile of sugar grains is sinking, beyond saving. She stirs it casually into the brew.

No, that’s not what I’m asking. Obviously if you’d had one you wouldn’t be agnostic. I mean, from a scientific perspective, how would you tell one from the other? In brain activity terms – at least with the sensitivity levels of our current equipment – I can tell you they are indistinguishable. And as far as my subjects are concerned, in experiential terms also.

So God is an illusion conjured by a pattern of firing in our brains?