Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain
John Lardas Modern
Published:
2021
Online ISBN:
9780226799599
Print ISBN:
9780226797182
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John Lardas Modern
Pages
75–131
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Published:
October 2021
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Modern, John Lardas, 'Thinking About Cognitive Scientists Thinking About Religion', Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (
CHICAGO STYLE
Modern, John Lardas. "Thinking About Cognitive Scientists Thinking About Religion." In Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain University of Chicago Press, 2021. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2022. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226799599.003.0004.
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Abstract
This chapter offers a bent genealogy of what cognitive scientists of religion refer to as the “hyperactive agency detection device”—the bundle of cognitive processes that prime humans to scan for and believe in supernatural agents. I situate the conceptual infrastructure of hyperactive agency detection against the backdrop of three interrelated stories: 1) the “season of revivals” that occurred in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the mid-1730s. During these revivals the concept of hypersensitivity to divine agents came to the fore—as a bludgeon for critics of enthusiastical excess and, for defenders and promoters like Jonathan Edwards, a new rationale; 2) Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” published in 1944. At Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Heider and Simmel claimed to have demonstrated how humans ascribed human characteristics, motives, and narrative to situations that were anything but; 3) the emergence of electroencephalography as it was theorized by the cybernetic pioneer William Grey Walter in the 1950s. This chapter concludes that cognitive scientists' pose vis-a-vis the religious assumes, as a matter of course, a human hardwired to believe but capable, at the end of the day, of overcoming this proclivity.
Keywords: cognitive science of religion, Jonathan Edwards, William Grey Walter, electroencephalography (EEG), Pascal Boyer, hyperactive agency detection device, brain waves, revivalism, pattern recognition, enthusiasm
Subject
Religious Studies
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