For anyone interested in the vagaries of the human brain and most particularly the contentious issue of religion, Paul Bloom, a developmental psychologist, has a truly fascinating article in the Atlantic Monthly on the origin of God. More specifically, he believes, on the basis of research with infants, that we are born with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena, that results from two separate and distinct systems of thinking. One enables the infant to make sense of the physical world; the other -- which develops a little later -- enables her to make sense of the social world. Because of these two systems, we see the world of physical objects as separate from the mental world (thus we can imagine "souls" separate from bodies). We also, because of our program for understanding the social world, have a tendency to see goals and desires in everything -- hence our tendency to anthopomorphize (as a child I was always talking to inanimate objects!) These two tendencies are, Bloom suggests, at the root of religion.