How does religious experience work in predictive minds?

ABSTRACT

Predictive coding is becoming the standard model of perception and cognition in cognitive neuroscience. Scholars of religion now face the challenge of understanding religious experiences in light of this new paradigm. Why do people report vivid supernatural encounters like apparitions, trance, possession, and mystical union if subjective experience is dominated by inferences that cause the least prediction error? Despite the existence of promising methods and pioneering theoretical ideas, few studies have examined real time predictive processing in religious experience. We point to several theoretical and methodological issues that need to be solved before researchers can properly approach religious experience in predictive minds.

KEYWORDS:

• Predictive coding
• religious experience
• experimentation
• eye tracking
• Hilbert problem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research (research grant # 0602-02813B).