Marc Andersen

Mystical Experience in the Lab

We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find that our experimental paradigm is indeed enough to elicit mystical experiences. Based on subjective ratings of experience, rich descriptions from interviews, and data obtained three months after the study, our data indicate that the experiences reported by the participants had a high degree of authenticity and had lasting effects in terms of memory and attribution. These findings demonstrate that at least some forms of mystical experience can be studied in a controlled environment. Prospects and limitations for the experimental approach to mysticism are discussed.

How does religious experience work in predictive minds

ABSTRACT Predictive coding is becoming the standard model of perception and cognition in cognitive neuroscience. Scholars of religion now face the challenge of understanding religious experiences in light of this new paradigm. Why do people report vivid supernatural encounters like apparitions, trance, possession, and mystical union if subjective experience is dominated by inferences that cause the least prediction error? Despite the existence of promising methods and pioneering theoretical ideas, few studies have examined real time predictive processing in religious experience. We point to several theoretical and methodological issues that need to be solved before researchers can properly approach religious experience in predictive minds.

Agency detection in predictive minds: a virtual reality study

ABSTRACT Since its inception, explaining the cognitive foundations governing sensory experiences of supernatural agents has been a central topic in the cognitive science of religion. Following recent developments in perceptual psychology, this pre-registered study examines the effects of expectations and sensory reliability on agency detection. Participants were instructed to detect beings in a virtual forest. Results reveal that participants expecting a high probability of encountering an agent in the forest are much more likely to make false detections than participants expecting a low probability of such encounters. Furthermore, low sensory reliability increases the false detection rate compared to high sensory reliability, but this effect is much smaller than the effect of expectations. While previous accounts of agency detection have speculated that false detections of agents may give rise to or strengthen religious beliefs, our results suggest that the reverse direction of causality may also be true. Religious teachings may first produce expectations in believers, which in turn elicit false detections of agents. These experiences may subsequently work to confirm the teachings and narratives upon which the values of a given culture are built.

Predictive coding in agency detection

ABSTRACT Agency detection is a central concept in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Experimental studies, however, have so far failed to lend support to some of the most common predictions that follow from current theories on agency detection. In this article, I argue that predictive coding, a highly promising new framework for understanding perception and action, may solve pending theoretical inconsistencies in agency detection research, account for the puzzling experimental findings mentioned above, and provide hypotheses for future experimental testing. Predictive coding explains how the brain, unbeknownst to consciousness, engages in sophisticated Bayesian statistics in an effort to constantly predict the hidden causes of sensory input. My fundamental argument is that most false positives in agency detection can be seen as the result of top-down interference in a Bayesian system generating high prior probabilities in the face of unreliable stimuli, and that such a system can better account for the experimental evidence than previous accounts of a dedicated agency detection system. Finally, I argue that adopting predictive coding as a theoretical framework has radical implications for the effects of culture on the detection of supernatural agency and a range of other religious and spiritual perceptual phenomena.

CREDs, CRUDs, and Catholic scandals: experimentally examining the effects of religious paragon behavior on co-religionist belief

ABSTRACT Previous research on credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) suggests that long-term exposure to religious role models “practicing what they preach” aids the acceptance of religious representations by cultural learners. Likewise, a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence implicates its opposite, perceived “religious hypocrisy” (forthwith credibility-undermining displays or CRUDs), as a factor in the rejection of religion. However, there is currently little causal evidence on whether behaviors of either kind displayed by religious authorities directly affect pre-existing religious belief. The current study investigated this question by priming Irish self-identified “Catholic Christian” participants with either a clerical CRED or CRUD and subsequently measuring levels of explicit and implicit belief. Our results revealed no effects of immediate CRED or CRUD exposure on either implicit religious belief or three different measures of explicit religiosity. Instead, explicit (but not implicit) religiosity was predicted by past CRED exposure. Prospects and limitations of experimental approaches to CREDs and CRUDs are discussed.

The Bayesian observer and supernatural agents

I want to thank the commentators for their delightfully constructive contributions. I am happy to see that most of the commentators welcome the application of the predictive coding (PC) framework o...

Clinical inertia in basal insulin-treated patients with type 2 diabetes – Results from a retrospective database study in Japan (JDDM 43)

Aims This retrospective cohort study investigated whether clinical inertia, the failure to intensify treatment when required, exists in Japanese clinical practice, using the CoDiC® database. How and when patients with type 2 diabetes treated with basal insulin received treatment intensification was also described. Materials and methods Patients with type 2 diabetes who initiated basal insulin between 2004 and 2011 were eligible for inclusion. Patients with an HbA1c ≥7.0% (≥53.0 mmol/mol) after 180 days of basal insulin titration were eligible for intensification, and their treatment was followed for up to 1.5 years. Endpoints were time to intensification, changes in HbA1c, and insulin dose. Results Overall, 2351 patients initiated basal insulin treatment (mean HbA1c 9.4% [79.2 mmol/mol]), and 1279 patients were eligible for treatment intensification (HbA1c ≥7.0% [≥53.0 mmol/mol]) after the 180-day titration period. During the 1.5-year follow-up period (beyond the 180-day titration period), 270 (21%) of these patients received treatment intensification. In patients receiving treatment intensification, mean HbA1c decreased from 8.6 to 8.2% (70.5 to 66.1 mmol/mol) at end of follow-up. Treatment was intensified using bolus insulin in 126 (47%) patients and with premixed insulin in 144 (53%) patients. The estimated probability of intensifying treatment during the 12 months after recording HbA1c ≥7.0% (≥53.0 mmol/mol) was 22.8%, and 27.5% after 17 months. Mean end-of-follow-up daily insulin dose was 35.11 units for basal–bolus compared with 20.70 units for premix therapy. Conclusions This study suggests clinical inertia exists in basal insulin-treated patients with type 2 diabetes in Japan. Strategies are needed to increase the number of patients undergoing therapy intensification and to reduce the delay in intensification in Japan.

Segmentation and cultural modulation in perception of internal events are not trivial matters

The application of perceptual and cognitive theories to religious phenomena has resulted in many interesting and productive models. Taves and Asprem propose to apply event segmentation theory (EST) to model religious experience. We agree with them that religious experience can and should be examined empirically despite several methodological challenges. In this commentary, however, we ask whether or not this can be done by applying EST. EST’s proper domain is external events, which makes it ideally suited for modeling religious phenomena such as ritual action (Nielbo & Sørensen, 2013, in press). Taves and Asprem’s extrapolation of the theory to internal events such as dreams, fantasies, inner voices, and visions is fraught with problems because the relationship between event segmentation and prior knowledge including cultural ideas is poorly understood in external events, and even less so, if at all, in internal events. The modulatory effects of cultural ideas on external event segmentation have proven to be quite subtle and exceedingly difficult to track experimentally (Nielbo & Sørensen, 2011; Nielbo, Schjoedt, & Sørensen, 2013). Before EST can be successfully applied to internal events, let alone religious experience, EST needs a better empirical handle on cultural modulation of external event segmentation. EST is essentially an object perception and recognition theory that targets dynamic objects (as opposed to static objects) (Zacks et al., 2007). Events are dynamic objects, that is, objects that are perceived to be bounded in time instead of space. Just as static objects have spatial contours, dynamic objects have temporal contours (so-called event boundaries) that correspond to external physical features, typically points of maximal change in a movement trajectory (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011). Event boundaries are information dense in that they identify the structural skeleton of an event and therefore provide the primary resource for classifying and predicting events in our external environment. Importantly, EST finds its empirical support in a small set of quantitative measures of event boundaries. Using EST, Taves and Asprem propose to model subjective experience as discrete mental states or internal events. However, it is not a trivial matter to map an object perception theory onto internally experienced states that lack external objective features. When, for instance, we model how subjects perceive actions, we can compare their subjective segmentation rate and hierarchical alignment with the objective features of the stimuli and manipulate accessibility to event-relevant knowledge. This makes it possible to assert that (subjective) event perception is primarily driven by (objective) points of change in the event’s external correlate. Although EST has an experiential component in its definition of a basic event, “conceived of by an observer” (Zack & Tversky, 2001, p. 3), this does not make EST more suited for modeling subjective experience than any other perceptual theory that relies on a perceiver. EST is optimized for human perception and understanding of external events, primarily actions, that have manipulable physical properties. EST and its methodological counterpart, the event segmentation paradigm, do not provide any guidance for applying their models and measures to internal events.

Old problems die hard

Taves and Asprem’s methodological agenda is a creative contribution to the study of religion. They claim that insights from event segmentation theory (EST) and predictive coding (PC) enable scholars to reconstruct original experience from public narratives by means of reverse engineering and thereby overcome a range of problems inherent to studying textual accounts of religious experience. The authors go on to suggest that EST and PC can expand and improve on existing lines of experimental research on religious experience. While we remain skeptical about the first claim, we are optimistic about the second. The academic study of religious experience has traditionally been divided between essentialists and constructivists, the former claiming that religious experiences share a common core phenomenology, the latter seeing religious experiences as determined by cultural expectations. The reason this question remains open is because it is incredibly difficult to determine if written accounts reflect actual sensory experiences, post hoc interpretations influenced by cultural schemas, or even fabricated pieces of religious literature designed for proselytizing or discourse (Taves, 2009). To solve this problem, Taves and Asprem argue that EST and PC can be used to assess which details of a narrative are likely to refer to an original experience. It only requires that “[... ] scholars are willing to take a more pragmatic and probabilistic approach [... ],” and that the narrative in question is based on a real experience and not simply a result of biased authorial intent, discourse, or genre (Keller, 1978). Exactly when such conditions are met is not clear, but it is fair to assume that the number of textual accounts that can be meaningfully studied, then, is vastly diminished. If these conditions are met, however, Taves and Asprem provide historians with a handy toolbox. For instance, EST can be used to infer that details at event boundaries in narratives are more likely to be accurate than details between event boundaries, and that “[... ] sudden, abrupt events will be particularly well remembered and faithfully narrated.” Taves and Asprem’s suggestion that EST is useful for analyzing purely internal events like dreams and fantasies is questionable (see the commentary by Nielbo, Andersen, and Schjoedt). But even in cases where narratives describe experiences of external events, Taves and Asprem run into serious problems. Obviously, people use event boundaries when they narrate events, but the idea that narrative event boundaries represent direct and honest echoes of what was once perceived and remembered by the individual is problematic; event boundaries in narratives are not necessarily fixed to original experiences. A subject may narrate an event in any number of ways using widely different event boundaries, depending on the aspect of interest, motivation, and communicative considerations at the time of narration. Narrative event boundaries are not magical keys that grant us privileged and direct access to honest and accurate information about event perception. Taves and Asprem’s attempt to solve the old problem of disentangling original experience from appraisals in narratives is not convincing. We do appreciate Taves and Asprem’s suggestion that EST and PC provide a useful framework for studying religious experience using experimental methods (Andersen, Schjoedt, Nielbo, &