Out of Our Minds? Toward a New Science of Cognitive Companion Construction

Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnographic studies of American Evangelicals’ relationships with God have stretched in a long arc from the breakthrough paper, 'Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity' (American Anthropologist 106/3: 518-528) to When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012), and then to How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2022). Each step along the way involves greater precision in describing the cognitive capabilities in human beings that enable imaginative practices to create potent and transformative experiences of presence.

In parallel, and for a lot longer, the field of abnormal psychology has been studying the experience of presences in the psychotic states associated with schizophrenia and manic states in bipolar disorder. Psychotic experiences of divine or demonic powers are extremely compelling and can have lasting changes on people’s beliefs about reality even when not psychotic.

More recently, the scientific study of shamanism has begun to ask about the cognitive foundations and cultural contexts for experiencing spirit beings and ancestors. The same questions have been raised about alien experiencers who report abductions, physical interactions, and ongoing relationships with alien beings. They have even been raised in connection with fiction writers who conjure characters who have a life of their own in the writer’s mind, talking, behaving, and appearing in scenes so real that the writer dictates what is said and describes what is seen. Most recently, they have been raised in relation to tulpamancy, which involves the deliberate conjuring of invisible companions.

There is a compelling prima facie case that all these visualizing and presencing phenomena activate the same suite of cognitive capabilities in human minds, even while being creatively modulated by cultural contexts. We shall refer to these phenomena as 'Cognitive Companion Construction' (CCC). How can we move in the direction of a theoretical formalization of this hypothesis about CCC?

One approach combines neuroimaging studies with computational modeling of human cognition to simulate the cognitive processes involved in CCC. These are being pursued at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, under the auspices of a Templeton-funded project on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition, which focuses on the production of supernatural-agent cognitions. Indeed, Luhrmann herself is now working with a neuroscientist to image the brains of people experiencing invisible presences.

Another approach involves phenomenological analysis of the experiences themselves, identifying key features, noting how they overlap and differ in the varieties of CCC. Such phenomenological analysis is greatly aided by careful ethnographic analysis. This nexus of approaches is being pursued by several groups, including those represented on the proposed panel. It has significant common territory with Anne Taves’ building-block approach in the study of worldviews and lifeways, laid out in Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, 2009). The building-block idea applied in this context invites us to identify a suite of cognitive capabilities that are differentially activated to create seemingly vastly different CCC phenomena, while taking account of the mind-culture interplay by which prevailing cultural schemas function as a playground for the articulation and contestation of established norms and expectations for invisible beings.

The full range of methods for moving in the direction of a formal theory of CCC is present in the proposed panel, which is unusually integrated both methodologically and thematically, in several ways.

First, each paper addresses one class of such phenomena, clearly indicating the kinds of methods employed to generate the insights presented:

• psychotic states involving demonic presences,
• tulpamancy,
• alien experiencers, and
• shamanic cultivation of invisible guides and ancestor spirits.

Second, each paper specifies a range of cognitive capabilities that are clearly manifested and activated in the specific class of experiences under analysis. These are the equivalent of Taves’ building blocks, but in our case the blocks are both phenomenologically distinctive and distinguishable at the neurocognitive level – though we freely concede that the neurocognitive level is merely aspirational in some cases, given the state of research.

Third, each paper discusses the mind-cultural interplay, surfacing the intricately complex ways by which cultural affordances structure each kind of visualizing and presencing phenomenon, perhaps by delivering default schemas that can be straightforwardly employed, or alternatively through creative contestation.

Fourth, concluding remarks by the panel convener will briefly synthesize the various cognitive capacities surfaced in each paper, thereby laying out the basic framework for the cognitive side of a biocultural theory of CCC. We expect these to note key dimensions of variation having distinctive underlying neuro-cognitive circuitry, to the extent possible given the state of knowledge, such as the extent to which CCC phenomena are experienced as:

• passive versus interactive, confrontational, or even aggressively hostile;
• affectively positive or negative;
• communicative and information-conveying;
• aimed at helping or harming;
• clearly and distinctively visualized; and
• distinctly memorable or diffuse in memory after the fact.

These same concluding remarks will also briefly synthesize the dynamics of mind-culture interactions, thereby laying out a preliminary framework for the cultural side of a biocultural theory of CCC phenomena.

Finally, the panel will participate in a discussion with session attendees, including soliciting feedback on the idea of a book of collected essays striving toward an integrated biocultural theory of CCC phenomena.