Uffe Schjoedt

The Religious Brain: A General Introduction to the Experimental Neuroscience of Religion

This article is an introduction to the experimental neuroscience of religion, intended for scholars who have an interest in the neurobiological and cognitive aspects of religion, but who do not have the necessary technical and methodological knowledge to evaluate this fields limitations and potential. The article reviews six lines of research, with particular focus on issues of ecological validity, the use of contrast conditions, and theoretical grounding.

Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual

Anthropological theories have discussed the efffects of participation in high-arousal rituals in the formation of autobiographical memory; however, precise measurements for such efffects are lacking. In this study, we examined episodic recall among participants in a highly arousing firewalking ritual. To assess arousal, we used heart rate measurements. To assess the dynamics of episodic memories, we obtained reports immediately after the event and two months later. We evaluated memory accuracy from video footage. Immediately after the event, participants’ reports revealed limited recall, low confijidence and high accuracy. Two months later we found more inaccurate memories and higher confijidence. Whereas cognitive theories of ritual have predicted flashbulb memories for highly arousing rituals, we found that memories were strongly suppressed immediately after the event and only later evolved confijidence and detail. Physiological measurements revealed a spectacular discrepancy between actual heart rates and self-reported arousal. This dissociation between subjective reports and objective measurements of arousal is consistent with a cognitive resource depletion model. We argue that expressive suppression may provide a link between individual memories and cultural understandings of high-arousal rituals.

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.

The resource model and the principle of predictive coding: a framework for analyzing proximate effects of ritual

This is a response to the commentators of our original article. We agree that the resource model requires more detail to analyze and describe the various effects of ritual on individual cognition. More evidence is clearly needed to support our functional interpretation of the observed data. We also agree that depletion is only one aspect of ritual and that depletion may also have other psychological effects, which serve as additional functions that need to be identified, described, and investigated. Furthermore, rituals include non-depleting aspects that may have completely different effects on individuals and collectives, which would entail different functions for both. It would be interesting to see how the framework of predictive coding and the resource model could be used to analyze other mechanisms and their effects. In sum, we hope that we have convinced our readers that using a resource model and the principle of predictive coding is an interesting approach for identifying and analyzing the proximate effects of ritual.

Images from a jointly-arousing collective ritual reveal affective polarization

Collective rituals are biologically ancient and culturally pervasive, yet few studies have quantified their effects on participants. We assessed two plausible models from qualitative anthropology: ritual empathy predicts affective convergence among all ritual participants irrespective of ritual role; rite-of-passage predicts emotional differences, specifically that ritual initiates will express relatively negative valence when compared with non-initiates. To evaluate model predictions, images of participants in a Spanish fire-walking ritual were extracted from video footage and assessed by nine Spanish raters for arousal and valence. Consistent with rite-of-passage predictions, we found that arousal jointly increased for all participants but that valence differed by ritual role: fire-walkers exhibited increasingly positive arousal and increasingly negative valence when compared with passengers. This result offers the first quantified evidence for rite of passage dynamics within a highly arousing collective ritual. Methodologically, we show that surprisingly simple and non-invasive data structures (rated video images) may be combined with methods from evolutionary ecology (Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects models) to clarify poorly understood dimensions of the human condition.

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.

The role of alcohol in expectancy-driven mystical experiences: a pre-registered field study using placebo brain stimulation

ABSTRACT We explored the effects of alcohol on expectancy-driven mystical and quasi-mystical experiences by manipulating participants’ expectations. By using the so-called God Helmet suggestion, participants were led to believe that a placebo brain stimulation could elicit mystical experiences. In this pre-registered field study, we set out to test whether alcohol could increase participants’ susceptibility to the God Helmet suggestion in a large sample (N = 193) at a Dutch festival. Participants reported a wide range of extraordinary experiences associated with mysticism, including out-of-body experiences, involuntary movements, and the felt presence of invisible beings. Regression analyses revealed that self-identified spiritualism predicted extraordinary experiences, but neither objective nor subjective measures of alcohol intoxication increased participants’ susceptibility to the God Helmet. Methodological limitations that may explain the lack of an effect for alcohol are discussed, while we explore the usefulness of the God Helmet in the study of extraordinary experiences.

Wilson’s 15-year-old cathedral

The origins and history of the evolutionary study of religion are at best ambiguous. Though philosophers, such as David Hume, Auguste Comte, and Giambattista Vico, had written about how religions develop and change over time – that is, evolve – the evolutionary study of religion rightly begins with Charles Darwin. Darwin, after all, offered us mechanisms to explain evolutionary change. Despite its illustrious founder, however, the beginnings of the evolutionary study of religion were not auspicious. In Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871/2005), Darwin accurately described the psychology of religion as intricate: “the feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements” (p. 679). Many of Darwin’s successors have struggled to match his keen awareness that the psychology of religion is knotty, multi-dimensional, and heterogeneous. However, Darwin failed to appreciate that religion presents evolutionary problems; rather, Darwin claimed that religion is virtually inevitable in an intelligent, imaginative, and questioning species such as ours:

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.