Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind
What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 22 June 2020
- ISBN 9780190091149
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages280 pages
- Size 160x236x30 mm
- Weight 522 g
- Language English 72
Categories
Short description:
Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.
MoreLong description:
A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology.
Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context.
The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.
Hearing Voices will be of great interest to those invested in the cognitive science of religion.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
Table of Acronyms
Preface and Acknowledgments
Chapter One: God Naturally, Disorder Actually: Ecumenical Naturalism and Religious Cognition
Chapter Two: Voice of God, Sound of Self: Sources of Religious Experience and Symptoms of Illness
Chapter Three: Praying in the Dark: Depression and Divine Abandonment
Chapter Four: Scrupulosity, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Ritual
Chapter Five: Searching for the Gods' Minds the Hard Way
Chapter Six: Ecumenical Naturalism: Principles, Presuppositions, and Prospects
Reference List
