Prayer, a common practice across many religions, changes not only how people feel or think but also what they perceive. Across three studies with thousands of participants from five cultures, more daily time spent in prayer is associated with more frequent reports of sensory and perceptual experiences interpreted as evidence of a god or spirit. Prayer most strongly relates to everyday events like dreams or strong emotions that feel not self-generated but caused by a deity. Prayer also relates to anomalous experiences such as voices and a sensed presence, but not to more dramatic events like possession, out-of-body experiences, or sleep paralysis. These results suggest that repeated practices can shape perception.
Hearing the voice of God or seeing an ancestor's spirit are experiences of the mind, tied to mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes about the mind. With the right combination of these, one's own thoughts and inner sensations can be experienced as coming from somewhere or someone else. Results from a large-scale study of U.S. adults (N = 1779) support the theory that spiritual experiences are facilitated by a dynamic interaction between mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes: a person is more likely to hear God speak if they have the epistemic flexibility and cultural support to shift temporarily away from a mundane model of mind into a more 'porous' way of thinking. This lays a foundation for considering how such interactions might also facilitate fiction writing and scientific discovery.