Communications Psychology
May 8, 2026
Ronald Fischer, Giovanna Bortolini, Tiago Bortolini et al.
Nonordinary experiences (NOEs) that are subjectively marked as unusual or special have important implications for our understanding of consciousness but are challenging to quantify. Estimates of their prevalence vary widely across disciplines and research traditions, and the reasons for this variation remain unclear. We address this discrepancy in a series of six studies. In study 1, we...
Zygon
December 3, 2025
Ann Taves
2 citations
There is a kinship between Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem and William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience that not only can help us to understand Flanagan's book but also can help scholars, particularly scholars of religion, to be attentive to an important development in the realm of the “spiritual but not religious.” Specifically, Flanagan's book continues a tradition in...
Research Square
June 29, 2025
Ronald Fischer, Giovanna Bortolini, Tiago Bortolini et al.
preprint
Abstract Consciousness research has largely overlooked systematic examination of nonordinary experiences (NOEs) in the general population. Such experiences are subjectively marked as unusual or special compared to mundane ones, are challenging to quantify and disciplinary biases complicate accurate assessments of population-wide prevalence rates. Using descriptive, non-judgmental phrasing of...
Religion, Brain & Behavior
October 25, 2024
Ann Taves, Elliott Ihm
As a book that seeks to update William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) for a general audience, it has many features to commend. It offers a finely nuanced discussion of James bo...
Perspectives on Psychological Science
February 13, 2020
Ann Taves
127 citations
Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and...
PsyArXiv
December 28, 2019
Ann Taves, Melissa Gordon Wolf, Elliott Daniel Ihm et al.
preprint
When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the...
PsyArXiv
July 25, 2019
Ann Taves
preprint
Religious experience played a prominent role in the psychological study of religion in the early decades of the twentieth-century, then waned as behaviorist and quantitative approaches became more prominent, and reemerged in the second half of the twentieth century alongside, and largely distinct from, mystical experience and, more recently, spirituality. Compared to the past, current research...
Religion, Brain & Behavior
June 9, 2016
Ann Taves, Egil Asprem
69 citations
We argue that event is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists, and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in...
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
October 18, 2011
Ann Taves
1 citation
This response was to have been published in 79/1. That it appears only now, a year after it was submitted by Professor Taves, is entirely the fault of the editor. RUSSELL MCCUTCHEON'S review essay obscures the many points on which we agree. These include the importance of analyzing the history of discourses of “religious experience” (see Taves 1999, 2005); the difficulties inherent in a...
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
June 2, 2009
Ann Taves
13 citations
William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of...