Phenomenological effects of brain function lateralisation contribute to Animism’s prevailing sensory metaphor

Abstract

ABSTRACT The structural similarity of animist ontologies across world regions hints at common underlying threads between them. This contribution examines the neurophenomenological context of animist experience, focusing on how a sense of consciousness and relationality can emerge as a primary feature of environmental experience rather than an imposed interpretation. While shamanic cosmologies show clearer links to altered states of consciousness, animism’s underlying basis presents a subtler challenge. This paper identifies how brain lateralisation – the specialisation of functions within and between hemispheres – contributes to sensory patterns structuring animistic perception. The brain maintains interconnected yet phenomenologically distinct modes of processing: self-referential processing (left hemisphere bias) and sociospatial cognition (right hemisphere bias). This creates distinct rhythms in environmental experience as individuals encounter the world at different scales of attention. Empirical accounts of developmental difference and neuropathology implicate specific brain structures and interactions, demonstrating how humanity’s distinctively lateralised cognition manifests the world both as the subject of our observation, and as a domain populated by potential conscious observers of ourselves in turn. This perceptual potential, shaped by neural structures, interacts bidirectionally with cultural frameworks to produce diverse and yet structurally similar animistic realities.