The European journal of neuroscience
February 1, 2020
Michiel van Elk, Lukas Snoek
The neural substrates of religious belief and experience are an intriguing though contentious topic. Here, we had the unique opportunity to establish the relation between validated measures of religiosity and gray matter volume in a large sample of participants (N = 211). In this registered report, we conducted a confirmatory voxel-based morphometry analysis to test three central hypotheses...
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2019
Michael Lifshitz, Michiel van Elk, Tanya M Luhrmann
162 citations
Some people seem to have a 'talent' for spiritual experience: they readily sense the presence of supernatural beings, receive special messages from God, and report intense feelings of self-transcendence, awe and wonder. Here we review converging strands of evidence to argue that the trait of 'absorption' captures a general proclivity for having spiritual experiences. Participants scoring highly...
Human Brain Mapping
May 7, 2019
Michiel van Elk, M. Andrea Arciniegas Gomez, Wietske van der Zwaag et al.
122 citations
Abstract In the present fMRI study, we aimed to obtain insight into the key brain networks involved in the experience of awe—a complex emotion that is typically elicited by perceptually vast stimuli. Participants were presented with awe‐eliciting, positive and neutral videos, while they were instructed to get fully absorbed in the scenery or to count the number of perspective changes. By using...
Religion Brain & Behavior
June 5, 2018
Neil Van Leeuwen, Michiel van Elk
91 citations
We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs. Crucially, we distinguish general religious beliefs (such as God exists) from personal religious beliefs that directly refer to the agent holding the belief or to her peripersonal time and space (such as God appeared to me last night). On our model, people...
Religion Brain & Behavior
December 22, 2017
David L. R. Maij, Michiel van Elk, Uffe Schjoedt
32 citations
We explored the effects of alcohol on expectancy-driven mystical and quasi-mystical experiences by manipulating participants’ expectations. By using the so-called God Helmet suggestion, participants were led to believe that a placebo brain stimulation could elicit mystical experiences. In this pre-registered field study, we set out to test whether alcohol could increase participants’...
Frontiers in Psychology
2014
Paul Lodder, Mark Rotteveel, Michiel van Elk
Recently within social cognition it has been argued that understanding others is primarily characterized by dynamic and second person interactive processes, rather than by taking a third person observational stance. Within this enactivist view of intersubjective understanding, researchers differ in their claims regarding the innateness of such processes. Here we proposed to distinguish nativist...
Frontiers in Psychology
2010
Michiel van Elk, Marc Slors, Harold Bekkering
46 citations
Two recurrent concerns in discussions on an embodied view of cognition are the "necessity question" (i.e., is activation in modality-specific brain areas necessary for language comprehension?) and the "simulation constraint" (i.e., how do we understand language for which we lack the relevant experiences?). In the present paper we argue that the criticisms encountered by the embodied approach...
L. J. Flameling, Jacob S. Aday, Michiel van Elk
1 citation
preprint
In their recent paper titled “MDMA-assisted therapy for moderate to severe PTSD: a randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial”, Mitchell et al.1 report on the results from a study researching the potential use of 3,4-methylenedioxy methamphetamine-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We applaud the efforts made to further establish the efficacy...
Hüseyin Beyköylü, Josi Marschall, Elio Sjak-Shie et al.
preprint
Virtual reality psychedelic experiences (VRPEs) may offer accessible alternatives to substance-induced psychedelic experiences, but their phenomenology and how set and setting factors shape the experience remain underexplored. We conducted a study in a naturalistic festival setting where participants (N = 210) engaged with a 7-minute VRPE while continuous intensity ratings and physiological...