Thinking About Cognitive Scientists Thinking About Religion (2024)

John Lardas Modern

1. False Positives

In 1948 at Tufts University, psychologists turned to the new science of electro encephalography (EEG) and discovered what they called the “kappa wave.” This newfound rhythm had been detected by electrodes placed just back of the eyes on the side of the head. Kappa waves were thought to make visible the process of thinking itself—making decisions, reading, discriminating, conducting simple mathematical tasks—a baseline rhythm of cognition. The Tufts study, conducted within an institution whose lineage runs through the Universalist Church and P. T. Barnum both, claimed nothing less than to have isolated the antiphonal swing of thinking and seeing, fixed concentration combined with visual tracking, that allowed you to take it all in for the express purpose of thinking about it all. Here were the inner jagged harmonies within the human frame that did not necessarily align with human will and control but nonetheless made them possible.

It should be noted, however, that later studies discovered that kappa waves had little to do with thinking and everything to do with noisy corruptions of signal, otherwise known as artifacts. A few artifacts and their corresponding patterns had already been corroborated among scientists—a loose rubber tube, shuffling feet, a misapplied electrode, troubles in the amplifier, and issues with electrical output.2 Kappa waves, as it would be discovered fourteen years later, corresponded to the rapid fluttering of the eyelids, sometimes so minute that it was difficult to see. Such all-but-invisible minutiae produced a rhythmic energy pattern picked up by the leads connecting the scalp to the amplifier.3 Science—advancing its evolutionary scheme and overcoming, at once, “biological noise” as well as the intrusive hum of our machines.4

The Tufts study was part of the early enthusiasms surrounding discovery, measurement, and decipherment of the “brainscript.” By midcentury the brain wave—that most cybernetic of lines—promised direct access to the material language of the brain.5 As part of the initial cybernetic splay, EEG was the newly nominated science’s most visible and recognizable technology. It signified a future in which normal cognition could be mapped and codified, when scientists would be able to predict and manage violent behavior through early EEG detection. According to the neurophysiologist William Grey Walter, EEG would soon be able to measure proclivities for self-indulgence and self-control, “together with the effects of encouraging or discouraging them.”6

Walter was an integral figure in the deployment of electroencephalography (or EEG). Walter cofounded the journal Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology in 1949 and was coeditor from 1953 to 1957. As a graduate student in 1934, Walter had been witness to the first public demonstration of the existence of a brain wave.7 As Walter described the scene:

Here was a moment—the moment of application—in which a correlation between cognition and the waveform tightened. A twitch with logic, reason, and sustained vitality. The quest for the “physiological basis of thought” had found a new medium—a “deus ex machine [sic],” gushed Walter, “it is electricity.” A new horizon had been properly identified. The language of human nature, in all of its ornate precision, had revealed itself. “The physiological background of our perception and thinking may be neither peace nor chaos,” Walter continued, “but a deep all-embracing rhythm of which we are unconscious, perhaps because we are so used to it.” Walter’s enthusiastic witness was tempered, however. For some things, he cautioned, “may be beyond our power to know. As so often, our apparatus will probably fail us just when we want to generalize.”9

For the most part Walter’s warning went unheeded. As epileptologist and EEG pioneer William G. Lenox wrote in the first volume of Walter’s newly founded Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, the brain was on the cusp of revealing the secrets we most wanted it to disclose. Despite the relative youth of electroencephalography, “the thrill of watching the brain write its own confession of guilt on moving paper is not yet lost. Descriptions of changes in the height and frequency of surface waves in relation to clinical symptoms is of practical value, but we must not stop there…. We sense an approach to the meaning and origin of the electrical activity of the nervous system.” Even by the end of his own career, Walter was admitting to the “eerie experience [of] discern[ing] through an electric machine the genesis of a person’s intentions.”10

The legitimacy of the brain wave lay in the epistemic promise of technology—the EEG as a truth-telling device, brain waves as unmediated signs of the real, accessible frequencies to a heretofore unknown. With the brain abuzz with continuous electric pulsation, there was the accompanying frenzy of pattern recognition when it came to brain waves. Here was an empirical approach to think about thinking, a way to figure out what we did not know that enabled us to know. Here was a way to distinguish between and make inferences about significant and insignificant data, normal and abnormal patterns. Here was a way to imitate how the brain made those very same demarcations and built a life for itself out of those inferences. Here was a cognitive-inspired approach to cognition.

Electroencephalograms were surveyed like a newly discovered country, mapped and keyed and turned into an atlas for the burgeoning neural cartographer. Brain waves were soon aligned with gender, age, activity, and pathology. To each, his or her own encephalogram. Patterns, patterns everywhere: normal and abnormal, for all ages, in infants, boys and girls—restless, aggressive, pyromaniacal, and prone to tantrums—in women and men, with eyes open and closed; brain waves of Europeans, Anglo Americans, and African Americans; brain waves during nighttime sleep and afternoon naps; in epileptics and the parents of epileptics, and family members of epileptic parents; brain waves in patients hopped up on mescaline or hallucinating on LSD; in patients with meningitis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and dementia; in professors and so-called mongoloids; in the delusional and comatose, in the brain damaged and lobotomized; brain waves in those who stuttered, had migraines, or were afflicted with multiple sclerosis, as well as those who suffered brain tumors, manic depression, and thyroid disease.11 With such standardization, EEG became a useful tool in clinical diagnosis as disorders that had previously been thought of as predominantly psychic (like epilepsy) assumed new physiological and electrical dimensions.12

In the authoritative Atlas of Electroencephalography (1944), there was a precise sculpting of the normal and abnormal by making space for exceptions to a strict reading of categorical difference—“questionably normal EEGs in normal adults,” “abnormal EEGs in normal children,” “morons with normal EEGs.” These unexpected findings served to refine the difference between normal and abnormal and to prove the spectrum of natural difference between them. The volume’s editors, Frederic A. Gibbs and Erna L. Gibbs, believed that “an increased knowledge of the mechanisms operating in the human brain strengthened the hope of controlling not only the ‘abnormal’ mental states which manifest themselves as psychoses, but also those ‘normal’ mental states which manifest themselves in crime, oppression, and war.” They also believed that, with advances in EEG technology, they would soon be able to distinguish, at a mathematical level, all manner of physiological characteristics, including racial and sexual differences.13

While individual results of an EEG could be differently interpreted, there was little, if any, critique of its fundamental mechanics, promise, and, to paraphrase Isabelle Stengers, the social relationships that it established.14 The relations that EEG generated at midcentury—to researchers, to the foundations that funded their work, to the patients who were promised answers about and leverage on their cognitive quirks and long-term illnesses, to the scientists in related fields who drew inspiration from the advances in EEG, to the general public invested in the promise of brain waves—soon became, for all intents and purposes, irreversible.15 Amid this triumph, neurophysiologists utilized EEG to probe normal and abnormal brains and their respective relationship to their environments. In doing so, they were also setting a research agenda for large swaths of the human sciences in the postwar years.16

2. The Cognitive Science of Religion

Electroencephalograms remain central to doctors and scientists in various fields, including the cognitive science of religion.17 In what amounts to similar practices under the sign of secularism, for example, brain waves have been used to both explain and explain away the mechanics of religion. As a privileged tool within cognitive inquiries into religion, EEG has aided and abetted a host of questions that seek leverage on the nature of religious cognition.18

Cognitive science—with its phalanx of journals19 and seemingly endless funding opportunities—claims to have instituted a paradigm shift in the study of religion.20 Pascal Boyer, one of the most visible figures in the cognitive science of religion (hereafter CSR), bluntly states that past theorizing in the field of religious studies has consisted “in the half-hearted adoption of particular academic fads.” Most scholars of religion, he writes, pay “lipservice to the current fad, while carrying on with the[ir] erudition projects” of mere cataloguing. Boyer, who has been considered something of an architect of CSR since the publication of Religion Explained in 2001 (a book that biologist E. O. Wilson suggests was written “in the spirit of the French Enlightenment”), pulls no punches when it comes to describing the descriptive mode of contemporary religious studies: “As a consequence of this lackadaisical approach to explaining religious thought and behavior, the field has become theoretically amorphous, and unresponsive to actual scientific proposals.”21 The solution, according to Boyer and his colleagues, is to take up the calling of the brain to explain itself to itself, that is, to offer an explanation of human cognition that conforms to the actual mechanics of cognitive processing.22

In this chapter I historicize the conceptual framework of CSR and tend, as any empirically minded scientist would, to ecological confounds, cultural artifacts, and the conditions that make possible (and increasingly legible) cognitive investigations into religion. CSR is an international and self-consciously interdisciplinary subfield with competing claims about its object of study.23 But differences in opinion about the origins of religion or arguments about whether, for example, religion is an evolutionary adaption or an evolutionary effect, betray an underlying epistemic coherence. A style of reasoning is present and practiced among those who might disagree about the primacy of belief or ritual, the exact relationship between cognition and culture, or the preferred means of measuring that relationship. One point of substantive agreement across the various corners of CSR is that whatever religion is, it involves the superimposition of intentional agency on natural entities, events, or even groups.24 I refer here, of course, to that curious engine of religious belief that goes by the name of the “hyperactive agency detection device” (HADD).

This chapter begins with a survey of the recent science of HADD and follows a series of trap doors that serve to contextualize, but also disturb, the story cognitive scientists often tell themselves in order to be themselves. This chapter tacks between the present state of CSR and the “season of revivals” that occurred in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the mid-1730s. These revivals, spearheaded and theorized by Jonathan Edwards, were a founding moment of Protestant religious history in America. During the revivals the concept of hypersensitivity to divine agents came to the fore—as a bludgeon for critics of enthusiastical excess and, for defenders, a new rationale. Rivals such as Charles Chauncy dismissed the season as a loss of emotional control to be avoided. But in Edwards’s attempt to experience and classify and adjudicate the real presence of spirit, he countered Chauncy’s parry by turning Northampton into a vast scientific laboratory for considering, objectively, how God’s agentive presence could be detected.

Between the present and Edwards’s discovery of a “new spiritual sense,” two mid-twentieth-century moments resonate rather intensely with the epistemics and politics of agency detection. The first is Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” published in 1944. At Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Heider and Simmel were pioneers in the critique of behaviorism that would eventually be known as cognitive psychology. Heider and Simmel claimed to have demonstrated how humans ascribed human characteristics, motives, and narrative to situations that were anything but. The second moment is the emergence of electroencephalography as it was theorized by the cybernetic pioneer William Grey Walter in the 1950s. I want to call attention to the degree to which CSR has drawn inspiration from Heider and Simmel’s work and has internalized much of Walter’s language of cognitive scanning and prediction. In doing so, CSR has promoted a particular vision of the human that lends itself uniquely (and disturbingly) to present concerns and desires. Consequently, CSR is not only part and parcel of a contemporary secular imaginary but, in its argument that the “whole function of the brain is summed up in error correction,” has extended this imaginary in a cybernetic key.25

Inspired by recent work in “critical neuroscience” and “embodied cognitive science,” I am interested in the historical conditions and discursive compatibilities of CSR.26 Where does the desire to locate religion in the brain come from? What story is CSR telling itself? What makes its approach so persuasive and cultus so inviting? In what remains I situate CSR and its will to explain religion within a history that extends far beyond CSR’s dutiful citation of canonical discoveries.27

3. The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device

Over the past twenty years the concept of a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) has become a central component in the cognitive study of religion. Cognitive scientists use this felicitous phrase to discuss the bundle of cognitive processes that prime humans to scan for and believe in supernatural agents. HADD is the flipside of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder).28 Whereas in ADHD, attention is attenuated by extraneous physiological activity, HADD is a corruption of attention brought about by too much attention paid to particular things.29 HADD is, and has always been, the source of our overdeterminations—from the worship of animal spirits to contemporary conspiracy theorists. HADD serves the universal human tendency to project animacy onto the world:

To be clear, the hyperactive agency detection device is not part of a crass claim about where religion is located, à la phrenology, but a more subtle attempt to understand the consequential integration of scanning and computational capacities of the brain. Indeed, the hyperactive agency detection device is not thought to involve one mental faculty or neural system but is rather “a result of the coordinated activity of many automatic mental systems.”31 Different parts of the brain come together to form a sustained statistical stare. The accumulation of statistics allows the stare to surveil. The eye is kept relatively mobile amid a swirl of information and data stimulations, tracking patterns across the surface of things.

Since the 1940s there has been an abundance of work on “the precise stimulus conditions that give rise to these percepts” of agency and the “perceptual ‘grammar’ of causality.”32 Religion, however, as a misguided form of agency detection—animism—has a rich anthropology behind it—think Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, E. B. Tylor, and Sigmund Freud. It was not until 1980, however, that the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie made the explicit case for a cognitive theory of religion as agency detection.33 Guthrie argued that religion could be explained as an efficacious anthropomorphism—the process by which humans projected their own humanity on the world, for better or for worse. Guthrie’s question was essentially this: if animism is a conceptual mistake (for who among us believes in ghosts?), how then to explain the situation in which many people still detect agents when in fact they have not?

Guthrie’s answer?

Such detections, asserts Guthrie, “arise inevitably, as by-products—namely, as false positives—of our scanning an uncertain world for what matters most. What matters most is agency.”34 The question of why agency matters is, of course, assumed. According to Guthrie and other cognitive scientists, the category of agency and their interest in it is a natural by-product of evolutionary history and not, for example, wrapped up in the directives of management theorists or business consultants interested in workplace and market efficiency. In terms of larger trends, however, agency detection has become a key concept for management researchers who seek to conceptualize and frame economic problems in terms of corporate design and the management of reward systems.35

One marvels at the lack of reflexivity when the analytic of agency detection is naturalized amid a culture dense with measures of “attention regulation,” “attentional expertise,” and “attention disorders.”36 And then there is the academic industry of “Error Management Theory” in which evolutionary insight serves to frame good and bad decisions, overconfidence and acts of deception—among businessmen, pilots, doctors, economists, and, of course, the pious whose decision to believe in God is taken “seriously” and subject to analysis.37

4. Distinguishing Marks on a Screen

The hyperactive agency detection device, or something like it, has been historicized and popularized38 and tested in the laboratory using, more often than not, two-dimensional simulations—television screens essentially, used to stimulate responses in experimental subjects.39 Indeed, the “proper evolutionary domain” of agency “encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival”—such as predators, protectors, and prey—“but which actually extends (as an inadvertently but spontaneously activated evolutionary by-product) to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds.” Just as p*rnographic pictures or drawings can arouse measurable sexual pleasure, humans are easily fooled to experience signs for reality when it comes to staring at a flat surface.40

The hyperactive agency detection device is a machine of sorts, inside your head right now. No matter who you are. It is a screening mechanism. All “typically developing humans” possess one. It is the machine that is at the base of religion. It is the machine that quite literally makes your prayers possible. It scans the horizon for movement and pattern and alerts us to forces of otherness, variously construed. As the machine that runs the program of prayer, the hyperactive agency detection device is responsible for sensing God as a fully realized agent. It is on all of the time, a form of troubleshooting the lines of transmission between you and what is on the other side of the screen.41

I use the word “screen” deliberately to mark the particularity of mechanical metaphor that is being used to designate a universal human characteristic. For how else would agency be detected if it were not wholly televisualized? Here is cognitive scientist Ilkka Pyysiäinen citing the relevant sources—Boyer and Barrett, among others, in order to list the “most common direct cues for agency”:

Such cues, argues Pyysiäinen, can “trigger the feeling or intuition of agency spontaneously and automatically, in the sense that this intuition can neither be rationally controlled nor initiated or terminated at will.”43

The cues involved here speak to a subject who witnesses from afar, seeing in terms of physical laws, expectation, and counterintuition. For scanning yields incredibly detailed knowledge but is ever at one remove. Scanning is a privileged form of vision that assumes a state of immunity or, at the very least, idealizes it, from the beginning. And it is precisely because the scanner does not get involved, physically, in that which it scans, that there is much room for error correction above the fray. Scanning, then, is said to be scientific, statistical, and akin to how difference is accounted for in nature.44 As a matter of real-time processing, improvement and growth are built in. Self-correction is premised on the scanner keeping its distance.45 Scanning, here, is said to be liberated vision, a process of seeing without categories or preexisting taxonomies, extracting patterns in an algorithmic glance.46

CSR’s specific deployment of the scanning metaphor as natural occludes from consideration what goes into the making of that metaphor and that deployment.47 For by 1980, at the dawn of the cable age and the twenty-four-hour news cycle (and the same year in which the American Psychiatric Association renamed the disorder of hyperkinesis “Attention Deficit Disorder”), scanning was becoming a thing.48 It was the logic of television. And it was how we detected the agency of others and exercised our own. Scanning also became part and parcel of a conception of the human, particularly a cognitive conception of the human bent on pattern recognition.49 As a physiological process, scanning serves to evacuate everything that weighs down the present save for its mathematical truth. Better living through scanning is sensing this truth of present conditions and continually producing probabilistic scenarios that may stem from those conditions. Better, stronger, faster.

5. Breaking the Spell

According to the cognitive psychologist Justin Barrett (who coined the term), the hyperactive agency detection device was an evolutionary advantage in a hostile environment. Our ancestors were those individuals whose vigilance bordered on paranoia. They “scanned” the horizon for potential threats and predators and, in the process, attributed agency and purpose to trees, rocks, the wind, and whatever else struck their fancy as alive. “We constantly scan our environment for the presence of other people and nonhuman agents,” argues Barrett. “If you bet that something is an agent and it isn’t, not much is lost. But if you bet that something is not an agent and it turns out to be one, you could be lunch.”50

Anthropologist Pascal Boyer has offered a friendly amendment to Barrett’s argument, writing that it makes sense to “over-detect” agents only if you can quickly discard false positives. “Otherwise,” notes Boyer, “you would spend all your time recoiling in fear, which is certainly not adaptive.” Like Guthrie and Barrett, Boyer insists that religion is a natural attribute of the human that demands explanation. According to Boyer, humans are expert at scanning the horizon in order to produce as many inferences as possible. They are always computing, learning from their mistakes, and maximizing inferences for the sake of future efficiency, survival, and sociality.51

Boyer writes that religion is bound up in this complex process of computational scanning and pattern recognition. In the hands of CSR, perception becomes disembodied. This lends itself to a conception of religion as bloodless belief or, more precisely, as a matter of looking at the sacred from a distance but doing little else by way of interaction. Yet Boyer insists that his is an embodied approach, going so far as to critique Guthrie for being too abstract in his theorizing of HADD: “What happens in religion,” Boyer contends, “is not so much that people see ‘faces in the clouds’ (in the way described by Guthrie) as ‘traces in the grass.’ That is, people do not so much visualize, concretely, what supernatural agents must be like as detect traces of their presence in many circ*mstances of their existence.”52 These traces, although not necessarily objectified in the mind, add up to a kind of object status because each of the traces is grounded in the material world. As inferences accumulate, supernatural agents are eventually imagined to have full access to any and all information that pertains to you: God as a strange phenomenal entity that is created and projected and internalized by way of scanning for surface signals.

Such access, then, is integral to Boyer’s understanding of religion, evident, for example, in his privileging of prayer as an instance of agency detection.53 “People,” writes Boyer, “tend to construe gods and spirits as agents with strategic knowledge, and therefore explain their moral intuitions as the fact that supernatural agents are monitoring their actions.” According to Boyer, “Concepts of full-access agents do not just require less effort but also generate richer inferences than other supernatural concepts.”54 These are agents worth praying to precisely because doing so seems to make sense of the world. These are agents worth praying to because the results are beneficial in the evolutionary sense, that is, in hindsight.55

Whereas Guthrie wrote of prayer as central to the religious imagination, Boyer situates prayer in a larger history of cognition, a larger history of seeking better odds and individuation. So whereas prayer may be confessional at base and a strategy of animation, it is also an exemplary statistical practice once an animated world has been established. So prayer has had a number of evolutionary advantages—it served as an intervention into a world defined by probabilities; it activated mental systems, like the penchant for cost-benefit analysis; and it fed into our natural disposition to frame reality in terms of cognition. Prayer has served its purpose, according to Boyer, and one that we can look back on with various degrees of patronizing respect.

As part of a complex predictive apparatus, HADD is key to an ongoing process of secularization in which the passions of religion subside, its disciplines forgotten, and its traditions recede into memory.56 The secularization thesis embedded in Boyer’s explanation of prayer, a story of cognitive progress, shares much in common with nineteenth-century anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor.57 Like his nineteenth-century precursors, Boyer’s cognitive view lends itself to aspirations of normalizing the human, of taming its excesses, of offering a cure for “irrational and dysfunctional cognition.”58 And, as with Tylor, a subtle strain of paranoia laces Boyer’s recognition of such dysfunction, a pose he also shares with new atheists writing in an age of simmering Islamophobia.59 Not only do religious concepts and activities impinge on our agentive potential but, to quote Boyer, they “hijack our cognitive resources.”60 For religion in Boyer’s scheme may have had its local advantages, but, at the end of the day, it is a form of laziness or obsessive compulsive pathology or both. Scientific atheism, on the other hand, is a hard job. For unlike religion, argues Boyer, “disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions—hardly the easiest ideology to propagate,” he adds.61 Cognitive scientists, Boyer triumphantly claims, can scan and see more clearly than anybody else. Accordingly, cognitive inquiry has the power to disenchant, to transform religion from a mystery into a problem to be solved.62

This notion of religion as a naturally occurring pathology has assumed a central place in the securitization of the world.63 Indeed, the white-hot righteous madness of religion has become the object of containment for those who pen the metaphysics of the war on global terrorism. Scott Atran, for example, is a leading cognitive scientist and founder of ARTIS International, a nonprofit group “that uses social science research to help resolve seemingly intractable political and cultural conflicts.” Atran and his team of researchers have recently addressed the problem of “devoted actors” who “adhere to sacred, transcendental values that generate actions disassociated from rationally expected risks and rewards.” Such actors are dangerous and unpredictable precisely because they have failed to achieve their own version of agentive reason. Having failed to negotiate the communal pressures on them, the identity of such actors is a product of insufficient detection of their own agency and overinvestment in the agency of divinities that define the coherence of their local communities.64 Rather than being an effect of calculating costs and consequences, the actions of terrorists have been the result of “costly commitment to idiosyncratic and apparently absurd beliefs and associated values, cued by sartorial and corporeal markers (e.g., veils, beards, and especially more indelible marks, such as the zabiba on the forehead of pious Muslims generated by repeated friction with the prayer mat).”65

As Boyer declared shortly after the publication of Religion Explained, “Atran’s work is a brilliant exposition of the evolutionary by-product interpretation [of religion] as well as a mine of references for empirical research into the psychology of religion.”66 Drawing inspiration equally from the current clash of civilizations and the evolutionary refinement of our hyperactive agency detection devices, Boyer insists on the pressing need “to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies.” This “understanding,” he adds, “is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism.” Boyer insists that this close-mindedness can be resisted through clear thinking about the brain and its by-products. Here is a place where politics has been transcended. Having arrived at the deep fundament of the human, Boyer is calculating the odds, just like the brains he studies are doing. All in the service of instantiating a secular imaginary of a particular kind.67 All for the possibility of “hazard[ing] a guess at what the realistic prospects are for atheism.”68

From Boyer’s post-Protestant perch, atheism becomes the most heroic, the most agentive, the most human position one can assume in a universe that has only begun to be properly understood.69 Boyer’s evolutionary frame assumes that humans, in general, and Boyer, in particular, have gotten better at detecting agency and more accurate in their capacity to discard false positives. Boyer, for example, claims to be getting beyond the “surface of religious concepts” and “moving from the table to the kitchen and observing how the concepts are concocted in human minds.” Religion is neither special nor should it be protected. Subsequently, Boyer calls for a recovery of “scientific ambition” in order to move beyond mere, but necessary, “description of those aspects of human nature that lead people to adopt certain ideas or beliefs rather than others.”70 In his fervent belief in the neuromatic, Boyer seems to be playing a zero-sum game. For the more accurate and less hyperactive your detection device becomes, the more agency that will be attributed to you and the less agency that will be attributed to entities that, for God’s sake, are not agents after all is said and done.71

As our evolutionary inheritance, the hyperactive agency detection device offers necessary leverage on the future. For the device conjures something essential to reason, itself. It is objectivity in a state of vital growth, becoming more efficient through the ages, more accurate, more sedate, more streamlined for the long haul. Rest assured, the hyperactive agency detection device is strategically diminishing its own hyperactivity, becoming its true, even-tempered detection device self. And the more it checks its own excess, the more we become the only agents deserving of the designation. Yet even as Boyer and others make the case for the fact that the hyperactive agency detection device contains the seeds of its own refinement, they do so in such a way that begs a question that has little to do with the time of evolution but instead inquires into the artifactual, and perhaps even agentive, pressures of our secular age.72

6. Northampton

In the midst of World War II, our natural penchant for anthropomorphism was discovered in Northampton, Massachusetts. An experiment was conducted, facts were gathered, and questions were asked:

In 1944, at Smith College in Northampton, Professor Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel (granddaughter of Georg Simmel) published their foundational study, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior.” In it they explored the discrepancy between the laws of physics and the misperception and mischaracterization of these laws by human observers.74 Heider and Simmel demonstrated that there were common biases in which our perception was consistently at odds with the way things were in essence. References to Heider and Simmel are pervasive in the scientific literature on religious cognition and agency detection, and Boyer himself claims to be updating their study when he identifies the neural networks involved in hyperactive agency detection.75

In “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” Heider and Simmel demonstrated, among other things, how different perceptual cues catalyzed different degrees of agency attribution. The attribution of movement in an anthropomorphic key, for example, was linked with the attribution of motivation. They conducted their anatomy of agency detection—on a flat screen—by exposing test subjects to a “moving picture-film … in which geometrical figures (a large triangle, a small triangle and a circle) were shown moving in various directions at various speeds.”76

The Heider and Simmel film had no sound, only animated geometry and the clackety hum of a 16 mm projector in a room.77 Heider’s laboratory surveyed the reactions of 114 undergraduates attending Smith College. The students were divided into three groups and shown the film twice. The first group of thirty-four was given a specific command: “write down what happened in the picture.” The second group of thirty-six was given the anthropomorphic prompt “to interpret the movements of the figures as actions of persons.” The third group of forty-four was shown the film in reverse and asked fewer questions.

An overwhelming majority (97%) “interpreted the picture in terms of actions of animated beings, chiefly of persons.” A narrative pattern emerged among these groups—the big triangle was often typecast male—“aggressive, warlike, belligerent, pugnacious, quarrelsome, troublesome, mean, angry, bad-tempered … bully, villain, taking advantage of his size … dominating, power-loving, possessive.” Two-thirds of the second group attributed femininity to the circle, describing “her” as “frightened, afraid, fearful, cowardly, shy, timid, meek, not too sure of herself … helpless, dependent.” The gendered ecology in which this film was screened was leaving its mark in the meaning attributed to it. Students here, in becoming accustomed to living vicariously through a screen, were also being induced to narrate sexual difference as a scripted drama: a way of seeing becoming increasingly compatible with a way of being in the world.

Looking back on the experiment that made his career, Heider cannot help but signal the universality of the truth that he had discovered. “It has been impressive,” he writes, “the way almost everybody who has watched it has perceived the picture in terms of human action and human feelings.” This, of course, is not surprising given that Heider and Simmel had rigged the system. In their composition and editing they had produced a film that drew from narrative expectations, domestic hierarchies, and gendered conventions of the time. They had infused drama into the flatness of lines and arcs. It was, indeed, a story about humans. For as Heider later admitted, he had loaded his film with all kinds of anthropomorphic cues—“As I planned the action of the film,” Heider recalled, “I thought of the small triangle and the circle as a pair of lovers or friends, and I thought of the big triangle as a bully who intruded on them. The rectangle served as a room with a door, which could be opened or closed. The movements of the three characters were such that the two smaller ones in the end defeated and eluded the bully.” Geometry was meant, here, to be alive. And, indeed, geometry was manifest—in “apparently” conscious shapes and movements, gendered prompts, and scenes of domestic conflict. Despite his tampering, Heider concluded that “movements or behavior, if you like, of even unchanging forms can produce an impelling impression of a network of interpersonal events and relations involving love, hate, power connections, fights, and happy reunions.”78 Universal human emotions generated by particular marks on a screen.

And the elephant in the room—the cognitive dissonance experienced by those primed, according to Heider’s script, to humanize cardboard shapes moving around a pull-down screen in a small room. At least one Smith undergraduate noted these artificial constraints (and the possibility that the results of this experiment were present from the very beginning): “The first thing we see in this little episode,” she remarked, “is triangle numberone closing the door of his square. Let’s insist that the action of the play is on a two-dimensional surface (not that it makes much difference) and we will undoubtedly start calling the square in which triangle number-one seems to make his dwelling, a house, which infers three dimensions. But we are not sticking to the theme of our story.” The words of the anonymous Smith undergraduate hint at a pressing demand to narrativize what has been unnaturally internalized. For in the extended riff and hesitation of this particular undergraduate one detects a reflexive recognition on her part of the power of mediation, that is, the capacity for an image on the screen to make its way in without leaving a mark.79

In studying the interpretive habits of these young women, Heider and Simmel had discovered a flaw in their cognitive processing that was also universal. This flaw, in other words, was a feminized trait from the beginning, produced in the screening room where crass narratives of sexual difference were built into the film and, by extension, the diagnosis. From this perspective, Heider and Simmel’s “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior” was an implicit call to overcome what amounted to the gendered pathology of hyperactive agency detection and to temper this feminine proclivity in all of us—and all in the service of a universal type, beyond sexual difference.80 No wonder, then, that Heider and Simmel lamented how “experiments on the perception of the behavior of others” have been stalled by an overemphasis on physical characteristics and facial recognition. There was a deeper layer, they inferred, not readily accessible but nonetheless where our shared humanity occurred. Consequently, in order to access this level, “we have presented situations and activities without the face.” The individuality of individuals, in other words, had a formal essence. And it was precisely this formal essence that conditioned its recognition.81

7. Jonathan Edwards, Hyperactive Agency Detector

The “enthusiastical town of Northampton” was also ground zero for the evangelical surge centered on Jonathan Edwards and the “season of revivals” that occurred there in the 1730s.82 Over the course of six months, beginning in late 1734, Edwards confirmed the testimony of over three hundred individuals who had been “savingly wrought upon.” By the summer of 1735, Edwards concluded that “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God…. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house…. The goings of God were then seen in his sanctuary.”83 Edwards would spend a lifetime defending the legitimacy of the “goings of God” and the human role in them. During the revivals and their aftermath, Edwards insisted that God’s agency had been truly and properly detected in Northampton.

In responding to critics like Charles Chauncy, who dismissed the revivals as a feminized spectacle—a “Grand Delusion” in which “Passions [were] rais’d to such an extraordinary heights without a proportionate Degree of Light in the Understandings”—Edwards struck a defensive yet measured tone.84 Looking back in 1751 at the season of revivals, Edwards acknowledged excesses but, more importantly, errors overcome. For Edwards, “full calmness and impartiality of mind” were matters of long-term observation and error management.85 Over time, in sermons and publications Edwards would identify false positives and deceptive data—clear signs of overzealous imaginations and conversion stories that did not add up.86 But Edwards cautioned his critics not to dismiss the whole for the parts but rather to appreciate the general truth of revivals in order to correct the particular errors that occurred in their midst. Continuing his own effort to move beyond the strictures of Calvinist theology and mechanical philosophy both, Edwards wrote that it was precisely such error correction that also occurred within the season of conversion:

Both Edwards and his critics, albeit from different angles and for different purposes, sought to explain this so-called Surprising Work of God. Whereas Edwards sought to explain the revivals, critics sought to explain them away. Both sides, however, framed the revivals in terms of agency detection. Chauncy sought to discredit Edwards and the so-called New Lights as hubristic. They were delusional, according to Chauncy, in their failure “to know the true Spring of other Errors.” God, in other words, was not the source of the revival. Passions were overwhelming a “due Ballance between Light and Knowledge in their minds.”88 Edwards, however, saw in Northampton a laboratory space where religion, defined in terms of the phenomenon of agency detection, could, indeed, be understood, refined, and deployed. In providing a list of “distinguishing marks” and justification for them, Edwards was nothing but a systematic observer of the social and psychological worlds of revival.

Edwards suggested that more was going on in the revivals than could be accounted for with a sole focus on God’s will. Expanding his theological focus with anthropological insight, Edwards provided a morphology of conversion in which he laid out the typical stages that a person underwent, and to a certain degree initiated, during the conversion experience. Edwards also acknowledged his own rhetorical sway, admitting not only to have played a role in stoking the fires of revival but also defending that role as providential. In carving out a role for human agency within a situation defined absolutely by God’s will, Edwards offered a theology of human affect that immediately served to justify the form and content of his appeal:

For Edwards, conversion was premised on the activation of the affections and not their mere exploitation (as his critics contended). Consequently, in his bracing sermons Edwards claimed to be generating something quite real in his listeners, helping to catalyze their inborn spiritual senses with “nothing but truth.” For Edwards’s sermons were vehicles of divine and human will.90 They were meant to evoke new sensations because they spoke simultaneously in two overlapping registers—of human life and God’s providence. Painting a moving picture with language, Edwards evoked time’s passage and icons from the local scene: dead bodies, grazing sheep, and roses in the briar patch. Yet his goal was to conjure the archetype amid them—not just God in the abstract but the living principle. God on the move. God having touched the ground. God assuming his status. God becoming a source of human freedom, still beyond representation yet possessing a natural personality.91

Such personality could best be recognized once one’s “new spiritual sense” (NSS) was activated. The NSS, whose foundation was laid in nature, was built in and ready to go. This new spiritual sense, and the “new dispositions that attend it,” declared Edwards,

As a culmination of Edwards’s theology of revival, the NSS was a mix of Lockean sensationalism cut with Calvinist orthodoxy, Arminianism cut with Newtonian insights into the physics of crowds. Edwards offered swirling descriptions of a human freedom in light of God’s absolute sovereignty. Moreover, the NSS was part of the nervous system and an intervention into nature on God’s part.93 The NSS was justified by both “reason and Scripture.” It was a term that solved the paradoxical relationship of human will and divine providence, “temporal things” and “spiritual things.”94

Just as the NSS could become overly stimulated and, therefore, errorprone, the proper regulation of the NSS was essential for not only detecting God but for maintaining social order, in general.95 As the historians Ann Taves and Finbarr Curtis have both demonstrated, Edwards’s theology was animated by sociological speculation.96 In taking the NSS as the object of his scrutiny, within a bubble of his own creation, Edwards honed in on the psyche with an empirically minded approach toward the study of the mind making (and living) the case for divine presence. In assuming a position later taken up by psychology and the cognitive sciences, Edwards examined the fabulous stories about how and why and when supernatural agency becomes an attribute in the world. For in gathering the testimony of the converted, surveying the reports of observers of revivals, and “observing” the signs over time, Edwards reformulated the question of whether God was present or not. Rather than focus on God or the individual convert alone, Edwards considered two things in relation to one another: God’s indeterminate effects on society and the human ability to detect them.97

Edwards’s notion of the NSS addressed how God’s actions stirred religious passions and how those passions, in turn, were the conduit of God on earth. Social order divinely generated.98 In a state of grace, a people and divinity looped in upon themselves so that the loop took precedence over individual parts, a process defined by Edwards in terms of divine love.99 It took the revivals to bring this loop to the fore for observation. Circles within circles. A popular swirl that was self-sustaining. Here was a self-organizing system that could not be defined in causal terms.100 It could not be measured, exactly, but it could be studied in terms of its effects, of input and output ratios. Edwards was engaged in identifying traces rather than first principles of this system. No hard proof but a simmering kind of certainty built on the accumulation of inferences. For “spiritual things” could be detected with conviction but not necessarily measured with precision:

Edwards neither posited nor demanded conclusive evidence of God’s presence. Yet in insisting that the agency of God could not be measured, Edwards assumed that the human will to detect persisted and could be fruitfully harnessed and, moreover, observed. The natural mechanics of the NSS was precisely what Edwards was interested in documenting and charting: “a new kind of perception or spiritual sensation, which is in its whole nature different from any former kinds of sensation of the mind, as tasting is diverse from any of the other senses.”102 For the privileged mark of God’s presence was not solely his own mark. It was also bound up in the physiological conditions of responsive human interiors.

In the end, Edwards shifted attention away from God as object toward the observable effects of the human perception of God’s agency. Moreover, it was Edwards’s own capacity for detecting these subtle effects that was part and parcel of his piety. For example, in his sermon, “The Most High: A Prayer-Hearing God,” delivered in Northampton in 1735, Edwards suggested that the practice of agency detection was synonymous with true religion. Prayer, according to Edwards, was a blessed attunement of our NSS. God, in “present[ing] himself as the object of prayer” and “in [God’s] giving such free access to him by prayer,” Edwards preached that our attributions of agency were a logical consequence of God’s presence. “God in his Word manifests himself ready at all times to allow us this privilege.” True religion, consequently, revolved around prayerful communication with God. “Let us live prayerful lives,” intoned Edwards, “continuing instant in prayer, watching thereunto with all perseverance. Praying always, without ceasing, earnestly, and not fainting.”103

Edwards put forward fundamental questions familiar to this secular age—what is the living principle of religion, how to identify it, and how to persuade others of the authenticity of that identification? For example, in laying out nine “negative signs” of God’s presence (epiphenomena that were, themselves, insufficient to prove the presence or absence of divinity), Edwards shifted the debate over the legitimacy of the revivals. He turned away from the question of the presence of God to the complex process by which his agency was detected by humans but not necessarily known.104 “God in some instances seems to have gone quite beside the ordinary laws of nature,” insisted Edwards in the md-1730s.105 Yet Edwards could not resist the will to measure these instances. In using a solving term like NSS, he gave license to a new terrain of assessment and new ways of framing the relationship between human and divine. For when Edwards claimed that “the things of religion take place in men’s hearts,” he was speaking of processes below the surface—natural processes of attention, reflection, and recall.106 In doing so he was generating a new kind of theological reasoning, one that may be recognized, for all intents and purposes, as scientific.

8. Detecting the Life of the Brain

It may be only a slight exaggeration to claim that hyperactive agency detection, given its lineages that run through Northampton, is a conceit both psychological in origin and theological in its demand. At midcentury, the neurophysiologist William Grey Walter acknowledged as much. Born in Kansas City and educated at Cambridge University, Walter was an integral figure through the 1960s in the diffusion of EEG. “The machines that flash and click in our laboratories now,” wrote Walter (in reference to studies that he was conducting at the Burden Neurological Institute), “are the first forms of the living brain’s extended life, the rudiments of racial understanding, as Gutenberg’s first printing presses were the forerunners of the Reformation.”107 Framing the living brain in terms of evolutionary theory, Walter mused that despite the stubborn complexity of our environment, the brain was becoming ever more precise. Or rather, by way of the neurophysiologist, the brain was becoming ever more objective, ever more capable of building a mirror by which it could finally see itself plain and whole.

In The Living Brain, published in 1953, Walter begins by writing that the brain is “something more than the pinko-grey jelly of the anatomist.” And the more is precisely what Walter spends the rest of the book making the case for, namely, that the brain is alive, purposeful perhaps, and agentive in its physiological makeup. Walter was quite self-conscious about attributing agency to the brain itself, ever hedging and preferring the phrase “intimations of personality” as the distinguishing mark of its vitality. The brain, according to Walter, was involved in probabilistic thinking that was independent of conscious decision-making. Moreover, such thinking was dependent on the recognition of pattern. “The animal,” warned Walter, “that cannot learn by experience how” to “avoid or overcome repeated dangers cannot survive. [Their brains] cannot deal with uncertainty [or] reckon the odds.” According to Walter, our “ancestral organ … evolve[d] a mechanism capable of … new … processes” of statistical analysis that could be “recorded as electrical eddies swirling in subtle patterns through the brain.”108

In the context of war machines, madness, and epilepsy research, Walter developed a brain topography machine that pictured the brain as an electrical network of responses that decoded “the EEG records automatically, plainly displaying the frequencies and amplitudes every ten seconds, [in a] kind of wave analysis.” Here, at last, was a method by which the abstract truths of the brain could be laid bare. It was possible, wrote Walter, “to chart the distribution of these responses not only over the cortex, but also as they involve the depths of the hemispheres. The intricacy of such charts is bound to be very great, it seems probable in fact that much cerebral activity consists of interrelated patterns.”109

The pattern that most intrigued Walter was the alpha rhythm. This was a surface pattern that was thought to go deep. Alpha rhythms are the principal background feature in the EEG of a normal adult. They have a rhythmic frequency at 8 to 13 Hz, and no two people’s alpha rhythms are exactly the same. Alpha rhythms are best measured in a relaxed, waking state with eyes closed, for when normal subjects open their eyes the alpha rhythms approach a flat line. “The more regular” alpha rhythms, according to Walter, indicate an internal “process of hunting for information…. Their rhythmicity is a sign of the perpetual quest, their arrest is a mark of its ending.” “Alpha rhythms are a process of scanning—[a] search for a pattern—which relaxes when a pattern is found.”110

In defining alpha rhythms in terms of scanning, Walter offers insight into a pathology that had yet to be called hyperactive attention. According to Walter, if your alpha rhythms do not dissipate when you have your eyes open and focused on a task, then your hunt for information becomes rather intense. Those individuals with hyperactive alpha rhythms tend to be lost in erratic focus. Their attention tends toward paranoia, reasoned Walter, because their brains scan incessantly without finding anything that triggers the stoppage of the scan. They are fidgety, nervous, weak-willed. Prone to surprise. As Walter writes in diagnostic mode, “an alpha rhythm which persists when the eyes are open and the test subject is apparently fully occupied—such a state is usually suggestive of some isolation from reality.”111

Walter was taken with the possibility of inducing such isolation by way of electrical manipulation. Using techniques of sensory overload, Walter demonstrated time and again how test subjects exposed to stroboscopic light reported “see[ing] things which [were] not present in the stimulus.”

Test subjects could, in other words, be convinced that agents had been detected when in fact they had not. Moreover, the descriptions had a physiological correlate. Flashes of light “evoked in the brain a characteristic electrical response.” Walter surmised that “the stimulus of the flicker received in the visual projection area of the cortex was breaking bounds; its ripples were overflowing into other areas.”112 A disruption of form that produced content. Subjective descriptions of the content, however fanciful, were clearly an effect of disrupting lines of communication within the brain. In measuring “the overflow of visual responses into other sensory systems,” Walter theorized that the hallucinations induced in his laboratory revealed a formal program underlying human cognition. And the program of the brain—whose operations were revealed by way of stroboscopic bursts—was itself engaged in projects of pattern recognition.

In theorizing the network connectivity of the visual cortex, the hallucinations induced in Walter’s laboratory were instances of intense reading for scientist and test subject alike. In the laboratory the brain learned to overcome its penchant for hyperactive scanning. This was where the brain learned to identify false positives and thereby become more probabilistic. As Walter gushed: “the brain must, quietly, unobtrusively, incessantly” practice “statistical analysis” and “reckon the odds in favor of one event or one set of events implying another.”113 Within a virtual space where agency detection was designed to happen (as was the acceleration of evolutionary time in which a single brain refines its own skills of detecting agents and false positives), all involved could become overwhelmed by signal. All within the confines of the laboratory set-up.

In his 1964 article in Nature, Walter relied on the stroboscope to make the case that the intensity of the flashing signals mattered little, if at all, when it came to priming expectations.114 Pattern was everything for this “system of extracting signals from noise.” Walter wrote that despite the fact that the brain was a source of incredible amounts of background noise, he had identified “consistent patterns of response, particularly in the extensive nonspecific regions of the frontal lobes.”115 What these patterns suggested was that the brain signaled its readiness to detect new patterns when properly and repeatedly primed. Moreover, the brain could learn from its expectations when they were confirmed (or not) by the experimenter who was in charge of initiating clicks that foretold of a series of flashes (or flashes that foretold of a series of clicks). Here was how the brain set down its epistemic grooves, context free, arriving at decisions before they were consciously made.

What Walter called the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) was a real-time measurement of the brain making statistical inferences, learning, and arriving at testable hypotheses. This capacity for expectation was, by definition, a matter of pattern recognition that occurred below conscious awareness. Clicks followed by flashes, flashes followed by clicks. Neither the content of the stimuli (clicks and flashes were interchangeable) nor their intensity mattered as much as the fact that the stimuli were patterned. The brain, here, rather than the individual per se was involved in probabilistic thinking that was independent of conscious decision-making. Here was the brain habituating itself, learning to be certain through repetitive stimuli, affected by attitude and social cues. “The CNV,” argued Walter, within a bubble of his own creation, “is very sensitive to subtle changes in human environment.”116

Not surprisingly, this is where it begins to get a little weird. For in discovering that the uptick in alpha frequency happened in conjunction with the perception of patterned stimuli, Walter made a further inference. The change in alpha patterns, he wrote, was also “the movement of some hitherto unsuspected mechanism of the brain.” “What is this mechanism?,” asked Walter.117 His answer opens up, for us, a conceptual space for thinking about hyperactive agency detection and, perhaps, too, a discursive condition that makes the detection of that hyperactivity possible.

It was, Walter reasoned, “as though the brain were working as a very accurate probability computer.” For the “behavior of the spontaneous and artificial rhythms,” insisted Walter, is “strictly in accordance with the effects to be expected from a scanning mechanism.” Signs of an entity that sees from above, as it were. Or, as Walter wrote, “the most familiar example of such mechanism is in television, where a space-pattern is most economically converted for transmission into a time sequence of impulses by the scanning mechanism of the camera.”118 Vision shorn of lushness but rich in range, rationality, and reach.119

So it was that in the same year TV Guide began publication and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was broadcast on the BBC, Walter suggested that the alpha rhythm could be understood as evidence of a cerebral scanning mechanism, ever moving back and forth, capturing signals and projecting them but also making sense of the disruptions.120

Scanning, here, hints at the complex conditions within the brain as it interacts with its environment—the means to gather data, to extract patterns, to make predictions based on these patterns, to gather more data, “to communicate every item of information received in any one part of it to all its other parts.” Moreover, the “millions” of neural connections that make scanning possible exceed themselves in the process. In light of his TV metaphysics, the metaphor Walter lands on to describe the authority of this network is not at all surprising: “The director, in effect, does not go to the projection room; he has too many other things to direct, what with the other senses and memories and all his own reflections; rather he has some arrangement by which he is kept informed about anything that might interest him during his waking hours” (italics his, underlining mine).

“How is the director kept informed?” asks Walter, a coy recognition of his own heated prose and the kind of agency he has detected, by his own scanning of the signs.121

Who or what is this director?122

Everything, it seems, pivots on how one reads “in effect.” Elsewhere Walter describes the brain as an “instrument more infinitely wonderful than television.” In conjuring the notion of infinity, here, Walter slips in a sly note of theological specificity. For in Walter’s prose one is struck by the simultaneous move of alluding to the underlying mechanisms of the brain as agentive and a steadfast denial that such agency could ever be sufficiently accounted for. So, on one hand, the brain is an “instrument infinitely more wonderful than television.” Behind this instrument lie the intentions of all manner of actors and overseers, including the director in charge of the various processes of sensory capture. On the other hand, Walter is committed to the idea of the brain as a black box—studied not by opening it up or revealing its contents in toto but by simply and judiciously observing what goes in and what comes out. So while “future research may well carry us,” Walter insisted, “into vistas of ever increasing enchantment,” such enchantment will inevitably be “describable only in the convention of mathematical language” and through recourse to inputs and outputs.123

An interesting subtext of The Living Brain is Walter’s warning to the field of electroencephalography to remain steadfastly secular. He urged fellow neurophysiologists to be vigilant in tempering the human proclivity to overread, to ascribe pattern where there, in fact, is none. “We are daily reminded,” wrote Walter, “how readily living and even divine properties are projected into inanimate things by hopeful but bewildered men and women; and the scientist cannot escape the suspicion that his projections may be psychologically the substitutes and manifestations of his own hope and bewilderment.” For Walter to recognize this primitive proclivity, however, was a matter of objective assessment, ever the sign of one’s civilized maturity. Such recognition, by way of brain-imaging machines, was an essential move in achieving the eradication of this pesky cognitive survival of hyperactive attention.

So there is a fantasy simmering between the lines of Walter’s work—of being able to train our brains and to temper (and inevitably overcome) our penchant for hyperactive agency detection—for such hyperactivity is a matter of the “inefficiency or inadequacy of the selective mechanisms” in our brain—too many stimuli and not enough mature discernment. But as we learn about our brain learning about the world, the epistemic future looks bright indeed. We are on the right path, concludes Walter, for it is already possible to imagine that “were these built-in selectors perfectly efficient, we could learn all we need to by just letting things happen to us.”124

There is a TV ease to Walter’s argument—not simply about how the brain resembles that cutting-edge technology but also about how the power of its persuasion depends on its representational prowess and promise of direct access via scanning.125 Like an intelligent scanning mechanism, the brain is invested in recognizing patterns on the horizon, capturing those patterns, learning from those patterns, and becoming better and more efficient in scanning the horizon. For as the logic of television plays itself out, the space between us and the director remains incredibly vast. Yet there is a payoff to Walter’s attention—described by him as a “reverent attitude”—“modest, thoughtful, religious.” For there is control to be had in such passive repose. For if we gaze at the television long enough our brains will eventually be able to turn it off. The fantasy of passivity, then, is instrumental. Throughout The Living Brain, Walter suggests that submission to neural explanation will beget a new era of the human in which freedom is based not on execution of a decision but the management of potential decisions. Note, for example, how Walter draws on the TV metaphor not only to understand the logic of the brain but as an example of the kind of human agency that was on the horizon and made possible by the neuroscientific gaze. By looking at an encephalogram, declared Walter,

Walter, like Boyer after him, was operating on the far end of the evolutionary spectrum. Both noted the natural human capacity to hyperactively detect the purpose of pattern in the world. Both acknowledged its evolutionary advantages. And both used technical knowledge of that advantage to readjust the intensity of this capacity, thereby perfecting its operation and making possible the detection of the essential rhythms that correlate with both the initial state of hyperactive scanning and a present state of sober analytic overcoming. The mystery of one’s own agency becomes a problem to be worked on and worked out.127 “I think in order to do great things with a machine,” confessed Walter at the end of his career, “you must somehow become part of it; we should know what it feels like to be a computer.”

For Walter, then, the story of the brain is two stories—a story of its emancipation and, eventually, a story of our submission. Both stories evoke an evolutionary frame. For it is the evolutionary frame that makes sense of Walter’s own desire to acquire leverage on his always already strangely mechanized self—for this is the way he will achieve his humanity—corresponding with the author of his being, holding a mirror up to his brain so he can see it seeing itself. This moment of conflating brains, selves, and machines is posthuman, postsecular, postreligious—the moment when—and here I amplify Walter’s own voice: the moment when “the master brain can discover its own place and settle down at last to its proper work.”128

9. Agents Like Us

Like all the other machines that detect patterns of agency in and around us, the hyperactive agency detection device is engaged in perpetual prediction.129 It is calculating how to act in an information-rich environment, that is, an environment made up of “statistical structures.”130 Scanning, here, becomes the base mechanics of probability theorizing—the fact that our agency detection devices are bent toward hyperactivity, of erring on the side of overestimating the presence of agents, is for our long-term evolutionary good.131 Tamping down such hyperactivity comes at a price, however—for reason, rightly arrived at, portends the jettisoning of our illusions of comfort and divine connection, of being watched over, of seeing the world straight and mean and just as it is.

Accuracy and access from a distance.

Since the publication of The Living Brain, the logic of scanning has only intensified with the proliferation of screens.132 There is little question that information processing has now become the natural logic of the brain and scanning the condition that makes human thought and human life possible.133 This is the kind of humanism that creeps up, that is embedded in the products that we consume, the media through which we socialize, and the devices that we find ourselves in front of at any given time. We scan. We count data points and calculate. We predict. We detect false positives. We learn. We repeat. We move forward. We function executively. We are human according to an elaborately detailed cognitive blueprint. And let us not forget that scanning is also an ideal of scientific sight. Scanning is to perceive as an information-processing machine, without bias or subjective inflection. As in a telephone wire or a computer. Scanning is to aspire to a vision whittled down to form, striving to live in the future tense when (and where) one need not be bothered by questions of substance. Scanning is to repeat without difference. Scanning is to draw from the differential between present and past, every moment, in order to produce the future.

Relentlessly.

But I insist that the hyperactive agency detection device, for whatever else it might be, is also a historical object. For the claim that the brain is involved in processes of scanning, statistical inference, and prediction may well be true, but that truth (and our arrival at it) is not unrelated to the desire for that claim to be true (not to mention the cultures and contexts that fuel that desire). This brain may scan the horizon for a deviation in pattern and it may then anthropomorphize that deviation into a fully realized agent, but what other machines and what other conventions also make this possible? For rather than grapple with the complexities of life as it is lived or, for that matter, the contingencies of science as it is practiced, CSR investigators adopt a rather clean (and rather unified) picture of cognition (of their test subjects as well as their own).134 Despite acknowledging the role that culture plays in the evolution of cognition, there is very little attention paid to mediation, discourse, and so on, and much authority invested into the prime mover of the story told by cognitive scientists—“selective pressures over evolutionary history.”135

So we accept the fact that we are scanning, that we should be scanning—ever more efficiently. And we, in turn, are scanned by those institutions that provide us the content to scan and create the conditions in which and the devices through which we practice our scanning. And so on and so forth.136 Cognitive scientists, then, with their dreams of buffered subjectivity and neurotypical flourishing, play an integral role in modeling what secular selfhood might soon become for all involved.137 Thinking about the brain, immunized from the world around, from its petty pathos and physicality. A future of information processing rather than meaning-making. Our hyperactive agency detection devices correcting their own errors for evolutionary advantage. All ritual, it would seem, becomes meaningless without the brain being involved.

So despite whatever doubts I harbor about the claims made by cognitive scientists of religion, there is one thing that I believe all involved can agree on: as religion drifts ever inward during these long centuries of the self, into the mind and into the nervous system, whatever religion is becomes increasingly conjured by particular modes of calculation. Which is to say that religion in this secular age becomes increasingly defined by the machines, broadly construed, that reveal its truth.138

10. Cheap Tricks

With a renewed focus on “Error Management Theory,” studies of HADD, or a more “nuanced” version of it, continue apace. In a bubble of their own creation, studies deploy the Geometrical Figures Task inspired by Heider and Simmel’s 1944 experiment and use Oculus Rift VR headsets so that “participants can now move around in highly controlled but immersive forestscapes that emulate the milieu of early hunter-gatherers.”139 They live statistically, with uncertainty, amid the virtual trees, in order to arrive at certainty in the long run.140

In keeping with their cybernetic legacy, CSR is currently riding a wave of interest in (and funding for) studies that explore predictive processing—that the “brain is a sophisticated hypothesis-testing mechanism, which is constantly involved in minimizing the error of its predictions of the sensory input it receives from the world.”141 As cognitive scientists emphasize the role that prior expectations play in interacting with incoming sensory stimuli, they seek to consider how the brain is “somehow able to continuously minimize prediction error.” And the question of how the brain copes with false positives becomes primary, once again.142 In a major statement on agency detection, cognitive scientist Marc Andersen nods to his ancestors Heider and Simmel even as he looks forward:

Andersen’s is a strong argument for distributed cognition contra the tendency of previous HADD accounts to a) offer “black-box explanations” (Atran) or b) to localize religious cognition in the relations between identifiable modular architectures in the brain (Boyer, Barrett). Predictive processing, according to Andersen, is a “challenge to a classic modular view of the mind, because it offers a philosophically elegant, mechanistic, and neurally plausible account of cognition and perception in which cognitive and perceptual architectures emerge as ‘profoundly unified and, in important respects, continuous.’”143

Regardless of whether cognitive scientists prefer the language of predictive or computational processing or whether they naturalize religion with talk of modules or distributed cognition,144 the most distinguishing mark of CSR is its wholesale internalization of information theory and biological processes of data-driven communication.145 The brain “process[es] information from a range of cognitive domains,” writes Andersen in a renewed cybernetic vernacular. Or, as Boyer surmises, “every bit of information is fodder for the mental machinery.”146

“Cheap tricks,” argues Boyer, “are important, if not essential, in many religious traditions.” Cheapness, however, does not imply fraud or disingenuousness. “In many places the world over,” assures Boyer, “conjuring tricks and manufactured illusions are perfectly respectable adjuncts to more sober myth and ritual. And after all, the gospels are replete with conjuring tricks.”147

My sense is that cognitive scientists of religion continue to have a few tricks up their sleeves, given their belief-practices in which conjecture becomes symbolically efficacious; given their own ritual intensities that move reflexive theorization into the realm of definite intuition, given their own beliefs in agents that are anything but empirically justified. To suggest as much is to turn Boyer’s brand of condescension against the CSR project of neuromatic secularization. Consequently, I have become increasingly taken with the analytical conceit that the cognitive science of religion is involved in its own form of prayer. For in prayer one finds the values around which to orient a life—prayer defined, here, as an activity marked by a subjunctive mood and the intentionality to commune with a divine agency, broadly construed.

The notion of “prayer expectancies” is a staple of the scientific literature on prayer.148 When people pray they often expect something to happen. But to be clear, the mood of expectancy that I sense in the making of the hyperactive agency detection device is not necessarily about belief in a future state of affairs but, rather, about a style of reasoning that feels right and gathers momentum as it moves along. In the manner of Jonathan Edwards, a perpetual praying to rather than praying for anything in particular.

So it is my outrageous conclusion that in the contemporary cognitive science of religion, prayer has become an apt description for scientific explanations keen on domesticating religion as an elaborate engineering problem. For in these pleas there is a kind of mystical closure. The model of the behavior of the brain becomes, at last, the behavior of the brain. In its relentless pursuit of a real-time picture of a living brain (admittedly yet to be achieved but ever on the horizon), CSR seeks to operationalize cybernetic principles by validating their existence in the brain.149 For there remain cognitive scientists in the world who seek to “communicate” (understood in terms of information control) with a vast and determinative and selforganizing system (the brain-environment complex). Their ecstatic communication serving as an explanation for everything and everyone else. Their brain-imagining technologies and technics of measurement becoming so many prayer machines geared toward making sense of the brain and leveraging that knowledge for material advantage in this world and the next.

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