Phenomenal experiences of immaterial spiritual beings-hearing the voice of God, seeing the spirit of an ancestor-are a valuable and largely untapped resource for the field of cognitive science. Such experiences, we argue, are experiences of the mind, tied to mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes about the mind, and thus provide a striking example of how, with the right combination of...
Abstract This chapter aims to show that working back and forth between neuroscientific methods and ethnographic phenomenology can inspire us to think differently. We discuss a neurophenomenological project to improve our understanding of the evangelical Christian practice of speaking in tongues. After several years of ethnographic participant observation in tongues-speaking churches, we...
Professor Tanya Luhrmann visited Finland in September 2016 as the keynote speaker of the conference ‘Wild or Domesticated: Uncanny in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives to Mind’ organized by the Academy of Finland Project ‘Mind and Other’. As one of the founders of the anthropology of mind, Professor Luhrmann has made a remarkable contribution to the creation of this significant field of...
A number of studies have explored hallucinations as complex experiences involving interactions between psychological, biological, and environmental factors and mechanisms. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has focused on the role of culture in shaping hallucinations. This article reviews the published research, drawing on the expertise of both anthropologists and psychologists. We argue...