The Neuroscience of Religious Experience
This book will examine religion through the eyes of this Self. There are, of course, many ways to study religion, but I believe an approach to religion through the lens of the Self will prove especially fruitful because one of religion's major self-proclaimed aims is the salvation of the individual Self. Despite the Self's great dignity and worth, it is treated by religion as conflicted and in need of salvation. The sacred texts of both the theistic and nontheistic forms of religion explicitly claim that they provide a "way" or set of practices that will eventuate in individual salvation. Thus, by studying religion through the eyes of the individual Self, we will be taking religion's own claims about itself seriously.
A second reason for studying religion through the eyes of the Self is that, on the face of it, many religious forms and practices are about transformations of the Self. This focus on transformation of the Self, of course, follows logically from religion's claim that the Self is in need of salvation. Many religious rituals, practices, texts, and institutions are very clearly oriented toward transforming the individual from one state or status into another state or status. For example, many religions in ancestral or traditional societies practiced rites of initiation that would transform an adolescent into an adult. Religions both East and West provide a multitude of individual devotional practices that allow an individual to communicate with and receive guidance from a God and that help to inspire confidence, resilience, and courage. Other ritual practices include healing an individual who has become sick, forgiving an individual who has become lost, and comforting an individual who has become bereft. Many of the prayers, rituals, devotional practices, chants, and hymns found in all the world religions are formulated in the voice of the individual "I." Thus, our focus on the Self when studying religion has face validity. Whatever else it is, religion is very much about transforming the Self and is addressed to the needs of the Self.
A third benefit of looking at religion through the eyes of the Self is that the method will require that we give due regard to the role of the brain in the shaping of religious experiences. There is no human Self that is not embodied. Because no body can function without a brain, there is no human Self without the brain. Consequently, no account of religion's impact on the Self will be complete without an account of how the brain helps to shape expression of both religion and the Self. Obviously, this does not mean that both the Self and religion are only products of the brain. Rather, it means that the brain matters. It counts. To fully understand religious experience, particularly at the individual level, we will need to take into account the brain regions that support religious expression. In the West, the contrary idea that matter and embodiment do not matter was an old Gnostic idea that the Church Fathers fought against and refuted in the first centuries of the Common Era. Despite the ancient roots of the debate, there are still some authors who argue that the body and brain do not matter or at least are of no real importance relative to "things of the spirit," like culture. A careful examination of religion's impact on the Self will demonstrate the crucial importance of the brain in shaping religious experience and that the old Gnostic position on "matter" and embodiment is scientifically untenable.
Religions promote the continuous transformation of the Self by encouraging the use of private religious practices and participation in the central rituals of the religious tradition. What are private religious practices? Examples include (but are not limited to) prayer; meditations; mental exercises involving the imagination; confessing sins before God and forming resolutions and goals concerning better behaviors; reading and studying scriptural texts; taking a daily moral inventory or reviewing behaviors as well as generating resolutions and plans to improve behaviors; private rituals and devotional practices; reading/studying nonscriptural religious texts; praying with beads and other handheld reminders; praying repetitive prayers; and adopting ritual gestures and postures such as kneeling and "making the sign of the cross."
I assume a neutral stance with regard to the possible transcendent source of the urge to engage in religious practices. I further assume that any sociocultural practice that reliably produces a religious experience is a "religious practice." All of the above examples of religious practices produce transient religious experiences. I therefore need to define what a religious experience is, and here I rely on the Wildman and Brothers treatment of the topic (Wildman & Brothers, 1999). For Wildman and Brothers, religious experiences are a subset of a broader range of "ultimacy experiences" (UE) -- roughly those experiences that point to ultimate concerns and elicit our most intense cognitive-emotional-spiritual engagement/ commitment. Wildman and Brothers use a number of sources, including first-person accounts, phenomenological analyses, the judgments of experts in religious discernment, neural and psychological correlates, and the wisdom of generations as captured in the theological, ethical, and spiritual literatures, to identify the distinguishing characteristics of UEs. Focusing on the characteristics of religious experiences, they note that such experiences can be discrete (short-term, single instance) experiences or extended (long-term) experiences. Elements of discrete UEs include sensory alterations, self-alterations, a sense of supernatural presence, and cognitive and emotional changes. Elements of extended UEs include existential potency, social engagement, transformation of character, and transformation of beliefs. When experiences are associated with a number of these markers of discrete and/or extended UEs in the context of a socially or normatively defined "religious" practice, and when the experiences are further associated with emotional engagement/commitment as defined by Wildman and Brothers (1999), then we are likely dealing with authentic religious experiences. The essential points here are that what most people would call a religious practice is typically associated with what most people would call a religious experience and that these experiences can be reasonably well defined using the Wildman and Brothers criteria. God concepts are concepts about supernatural agents. Supernatural agents are often (although not invariably) beings with Minds like ours but no bodies. Most often the Minds of supernatural agents are more powerful than ours. When there is a high God who rules over lesser spiritual entities in the supernatural realm, this high God often has a mind so powerful that He or She can know virtually everything one is thinking or doing. A high God who is also a "full strategic access agent" knows everything you have ever thought or done or everything you will ever do or think. These "full strategic access agents" again point to the intimate relationships that exist between religion-related matters and the Self. Only in the realm of religion will we find an agent who ostensibly knows the Self so thoroughly and completely.
Where do God concepts come from? One possibility is that supernatural agents actually exist and that our intuitions about them are largely accurate. I set aside that possibility for now and focus on potentially simpler solutions to the problem. Another possibility is that supernatural agent concepts are products of the human Mind gone awry. Boyer (2001) and other cognitively oriented anthropologists and psychologists (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2000) have helpfully suggested that our conceptions of supernatural agents are constructed out of the inferential machinery that draw on normal folk psychological processing routines concerning actions performed by ordinary agents such as persons and animals. God concepts are said to be "minimally counterintuitive." They depart from everyday ideas about persons only slightly. A god is a person who has no body and who can read your mind in such a way as to know all that there is to know about you. A "hyperactive agency detection device," coupled with the tendency to imagine minimally counterintuitive agents and the innate human tendency to assume that the mental is nonphysical, all lead to the propensity to postulate supernatural agents. Some experimental evidence suggests that subjects are, in fact, better able to remember minimally counterintuitive agents (Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2001).
Although prayer is one of the constants of religion, the practice of praying varies tremendously in form and content (repetitive mantras, praise, petition, worship, thanksgiving, etc.) (Geertz, 2008). When people pray or when they engage in religious ceremonies or rituals, they talk in a more formalized style of language. There is also a generalized displacement of agency from the pray-er or from the people in the congregation and onto the deity. This displacement process is marked in the language used in religious rituals. We will review those specialized characteristics of religious language later in this chapter, but first we must ask why religious language is associated with special forms of language and language use.
One reason why religious language is peculiar is that the addressee of religious language (God) is special. How do you talk to God? Most people have never seen God or a god and even if they had the superior status of God would require special forms of address. In any case, for most people, language addressed to a god entails speaking to an invisible interlocutor who may or may not respond clearly.
Many religion scholars believe that religious rituals are a major source of the world's religions (i.e., that religion is rooted in ritual). Whether this is the case, there is little doubt that attaining a better understanding of religious rituals may give us a better understanding of religion in general. In recent years, anthropological and cognitive approaches to ritual behaviors and ritual form have registered some remarkable advances (Bloch, 1974; Humphrey & Laidlaw, 1994; Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Lienard & Boyer, 2006; McCauley & Lawson, 2002; Rappaport, 1999; Seaquist, 2006). I will try to build on these advances by systematically examining psychological and cognitive effects of ritual behavior on the individual.
To forecast my conclusions regarding the nature and functions of ritual, I find that, with respect to its effects on the individual, religious rituals often involve a reduction in agency/volition. The individual sets aside his or her own immediate intentions and instead performs actions stipulated by others -- such as gods and ancestors, long ago. Religious rituals also constrain the decentering process in such a way as to facilitate selection of a new more powerful Self. In nonreligious contexts, this reduction in agency and its associated communal actions during ritualistic activities has the overall effect of enhancing cooperative social interactions and reducing the potential for aggression within the group. An example of these sorts of effects is the case of cross-cultural politeness conventions in social interactions. To observe politeness conventions, you put aside your agenda for a moment and perform a ritual display that signals your willingness to consider the other's comfort or point of view.
According to the Tukulor weavers in Africa, weaving has its origins in the spirit world, whence the craft was acquired by an ancestor and handed down to man in the time of myth. The weavers attribute their skill and their designs to knowledge acquired from jinn of the forest. Stout (2002) studied adze makers of the village of Langda in Indonesian Irian Jaya. He found that adze-making skill is acquired through a period of apprenticeship at the feet of a master that may last five years or more. Stout shows that "Adze production is itself a social phenomenon, defined as much by personal and group relations, social norms, and mythic significance as by specific reduction strategies and technical terminology". Religious ritual permeated the lives of traditional peoples and likely permeated the lives of ancestral populations. Given the integration of stone tool-making technologies into the religious rituals of the tribe, it is reasonable to assume that ritual influenced the development of technical intelligence in human beings.
The effects of religious rituals on early hominids and early human beings, therefore, must have been tremendous. These rituals created craftsmen and warriors, they created reverence for traditional ways and a sense of the past, they healed, and they enhanced group cohesion. Ritual was and is central to human life.