Monday, January 24, 2022, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EST

Robert M. McCauley, William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy and founding Director of Emory's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

“The Cognitive Basis of Similarities in the Forms of Religious Representations and Mental Abnormalities”

Fast, mandatory, automatic intuitions come in two varieties.  They possess either a maturational or a practiced naturalness.  By-product theorists in the cognitive science of religions hold that the forms of many religious representations turn on cuing the operations of maturationally natural dispositions of mind.  Such origins imbue those representations with various cognitive advantages (beyond speed and automaticity).  They render them readily recognizable, memorable, and communicable as well as inferentially rich.  Alterations or impairments in the operations of many of those same maturationally natural cognitive systems stand behind features (symptoms) of many mental abnormalities that closely resemble religious forms—from  such things as hearing voices (in schizophrenia) to feelings of urgency about carrying out ritualized behaviors (in obsessive compulsive disorder).  In the light of these analyses, one question that arises is whether religious representations might be said to cause (in the sense of eliciting) such mental abnormalities. Emory’s own Bob McCauley, an expert in this fascinating field, will raise this and related questions—and entertain our questions, as well.