The neuroscience of religious experiences | Patrick McNamara

• My particular work has uncovered aspects of religiosity that runs counter to standard theories of religion. Most scholars of religion subscribe to the theory that the function of religion is to modulate anxiety levels, or it's to stave off the fear of death. In other words, religion as a security blanket. But that's a side effect of what I think religion is really doing. The real thing that religion is doing is that it's looking for ways to disrupt current models of the self in its relation to the world.

So the religious mind is constantly producing these other worlds. And when religion does that, it very interestingly calls into question the fundamental aspects of our world. I think if we wanna understand human nature, we have to understand religion. My name is Patrick McNamara, and I'm an experimental neuroscientist, and I have a special interest in studying relationships of brain activity to religious consciousness.

Our identities are constantly under construction. Religions have provided the traditional tools to edit those self models, to update them, to shape them, to create them. Therefore, self and religion are bound up together because there's no way for the brain to function optimally, even normally without those self models. So, we have to understand that the brain is a prediction machine, it's a desiring machine, it's looking to build up models of what we can expect to occur next in the world.

What the religious mind is doing is looking for evidence out in the world to disconfirm current models of the world, in particular current self models of the world, the individual, and his or her world. So there's no way that we're gonna thrive or flourish in the world unless we get very good at updating our self models. One of the most interesting things about religious experience and religious cognition is it constantly promotes imaginative simulation of other possible worlds. A good prediction machine is constantly spinning out scenarios of what might be, what could possibly be—because when we disconfirm those current self models, we then know that our current models are not adequate, and so we gotta update them.

My point of view is that religious experiences reflect a neurotechnology to update the current sense of self. It appears to be what nature has evolved for us to make self-transformation as easy as possible. And when you dig into that process, what you find is a very interesting set of cognitive processing routines—what's called a 'decentering.'

The decentering process is composed of four cognitive steps: The first one is the decentering itself where the executive sense of self is taken offline. That self that makes decisions, that forms intentions, that forms goals, wants to accomplish things in the world—gets decentered, gets downregulated. The second step is the individual undergoes what we call a 'liminal experience.' So they're no longer feeling in control, and so their sense of self just drifts, and they're immersed in a sea of images, affects, emotions.

They experience these very intense emotional experiences that are labeled spiritual, and then the brain does a search and an updating process; a search for a stronger, better, more adequate self model. And then the last step in the decentering process is when that self model is then basically activated, and a new sense of self emerges from the decentering process. And that's one of the main accomplishments of religiosity when it's working well.

It gives the individual a set of tools to do that updating of the sense of self, so that you have an enriched sense of self, and the individual is able to live a more flourishing and thriving life. These processes that were normally held as sacred within all the world's religious traditions are now entering the secular arenas—and because they're so powerful, they're dangerous. In the wrong hands, it can create fanatics, people who are immune to updating their beliefs, and if you question those beliefs, you get violent reactions.

The decentering process is such a powerful neurotechnology. It makes us incred...