The papers in this session engage various methodological and theoretical applications of cognitive science in order to suggest ways in which incorporating scientific research furthers the comparative study of religion and the history of religion, or allows us access to potentially transcultural patterns of religious experience. “Cognitive science” designates a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the study of the mind that integrates research from the neurosciences, psychology (including developmental, cognitive, evolutionary, and social psychology), anthropology, and philosophy. The main goal of this Unit is to bring together cognitive scientists, historians of religion, ethnographers, empirically-oriented theologians, and philosophers of religion to explore applications of cognitive science to religious phenomena, as well as religious insights into the study of the human mind.
This paper presents data from a longitudinal EEG study on dreaming, spirituality, and attachment to supernatural agents. It highlights to role of dreaming in processing social relationships and emotional dynamics, and proposes a new framework for taking a relational approach within the cognitive science of religion.
This presentation argues for integrating enactive cognition into CSR, using Agency Detection as a case study. This key element in CSR’s explanatory model faces increasing skepticism, due in part to a lack of experimental confirmation. One proposal is to recast agency detection in terms of predictive processing. While this is promising, serious concerns remain, e.g. the ultimate sources of the “priors” that inform prediction, and compatibility with evolution. Enactive cognition offers a better approach: a fully embodied, socially embedded model. AGENT is not a mental representation triggered. Rather, under specifiable configurations of the brain-body-world nexus, a disruption in goal-directed action engages an embodied agency-attunement that guides behavior in re-establishing action. The perception of agency emerges from ‘agency-attuned’ responses—it is enacted rather than detected. This model encompasses key contributions of predictive processing, but eliminates problematic cognitivist assumptions, preserving the role of ‘agency detection’ within CSR. Additional contributions will be suggested.
In this paper I explore the hypothesis that a range of characteristically religious phenomena -- from spirit possession and ritual action to divinization and religious healing -- are found where two aspects of human behavior that are normally conjoined come apart, namely, voluntary action and the feeling of consciously willing that action. I argue that this hypothesis preserves the key insights of the explanatory model that has predominated the cognitive science of religion -- namely, the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality, our so-called “theory of mind” faculty -- while subsuming this model within a more comprehensive theoretical framework. At the same time, it frees the cognitive approach from some problematic presuppositions that have placed it at odds with more established humanistic approaches to the study of religion.
T.M. Luhrmann has demonstrated the role of mental imagery practices, called “kataphatic prayer,” in allowing evangelical Christians to hear God and interact with Him through their physical senses and their minds. The online community of tulpamancers employs similar practices to develop a kind of imaginary friend within their mind, known as a tulpa. Scholarship has not yet engaged in a sustained comparison of the two communities and their use of kataphatic techniques. This paper fills that gap, seeking to understand how the psychological processes in question foster the experience of contact with a non-human other (God in the case of evangelical Christians and tulpas in the case of tulpamancers) and examining the role of faith and an encouraging community as supporting elements in the process. Additionally, I explore how these mental interactions with non-human others can provide psychological benefits like bolstering emotional well-being and mitigating negative effects of mental illness.
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has to date been dominated by evolutionary approaches to religion built on a cognitivist, computational understandings of the mind. Even as cognitive science has, since the late 1990s, begun to move away from such frameworks, CSR has yet to evolve accordingly. The cognitive scientific study of meditation (CSM) was introduced in the early 1990s from a non-cognitivist perspective, namely embodied and enactive cognition, however this subfield has been compromised by key tenets of Buddhist modernism like Buddhist exceptionalism and the idea that Buddhist meditation is itself a science of the mind. This paper will seek to address this lacuna in CSR and evade these shortcomings of the subfield of CSM by sketching out an enactive approach to the study of contemporary Abrahamic contemplative practice in North America.