Episode Details

A retrospective journey through four years of episode releases had us asking this fundamental question. The short answer: of course it is!

A few of the most recently released episodes prompted us to think back to about a dozen other episodes we’ve released in the past that focused on the cognitive machinery in our heads, and got us asking: are spiritual/religious experiences a figment of our imaginations?

This retrospective line of thinking began with the pair of episodes released a couple weeks back, looking at the emotion of awe (#151 and #152): a uniquely human emotion which always accompanies a spiritual experience (animals seem to experience other emotions like joy, rage, surprise, sadness … but not awe, because they don’t exhibit the other physiological changes in breathing, heart rate or goosebumps that accompany awe). 

One of those guest experts had already talked to us a couple years ago about two other forms of software in our head which also contribute to a spiritual or religious experience: the “hypersensitive agency detector” and the “promiscuous teleology detector” (#78).  Those two detectors are behind the human tendency to think there’s a reason or explanation for things that happen and an intention or will or agent behind it (“why did that family have to die in that tornado?”).  This reminded us of three episodes we did a while back that looked at the neurobiology — the “wiring” — behind a spiritual or religious experience, one that can be hijacked by hallucinogenic drugs (#43, #44, and #45), as well as the machinery and