T. M. Luhrmann

• Stanford University

This paper presents evidence that some—but not all—religious experts in a particular faith may have a schizophrenia-like psychotic process which is managed or mitigated by their religious practice, in that they are able to function effectively and are not identified by their community as ill. We conducted careful phenomenological interviews, in con...

This essay invites us to understand ethnography not only as a science‐like comparative enterprise but also as a spiritual discipline. This is because ethnography enables us to imagine other ways of living in the world. The fieldwork, the writing, and even the reading of ethnographies provide people with some external perspective on themselves. Ethn...

We present a mixed-methods study, from an anthropological perspective, of 22 healthy voice-hearers i.e., people who report hearing voices but have no need for clinical care. They were interviewed using the Varieties Of Individual Voice-Experiences Scale (VOICES), a new scale assessing phenomenology, beliefs and relationships with voices, and their...

There are communities in which hearing voices frequently is common and expected, and in which participants are not expected to have a need for care. This paper compares the ideas and practices of these communities. We observe that these communities utilize cultural models to identify and to explain voice-like events—and that there are some common f...

When scholars and scientists set out to understand religious commitment, the sensation that gods and spirits are real may be at least as important a target of inquiry as the belief that they are real. The sensory and quasisensory events that people take to be the presence of spirit—the voice of an invisible being, a feeling that a person who is dea...

La phénoménologie de la psychose est notoirement difficile à appréhender. Je propose ici une étude de cas de voix psychotiques dans lesquels ni les mots ni la voix proprement dite n’ont une place de premier plan. J’examine l’étrangeté de ces expériences, puis j’attire l’attention sur les caractéristiques de ce phénomène qui consiste à entendre des...

Background The content of auditory hallucinations (AHs) and delusions is malleable and reflects the social environment and the local culture. COVID-19 is a significant new feature of the social environment, yet research has not yet determined how the phenomenology of psychosis has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak. Methods Adult patients (N = 17...

How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? By asking simple questions about humans, animals and other entities – for example, ‘Do beetles get hungry? Remember things? Feel love?’ – we reconstructed concepts of mental life from the bottom up among adults (N = 711) and children (ages 6–12 years, N = 693) in the USA, Ghana, Thailand, China a...

Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people...

The sense of presence—or the sense of “being there”—is a poorly understood phenomenon, especially in the case of “unseen others,” e.g., God. We used the tools of virtual reality (VR) to explore the effects of active imagination in creating a sense of presence of an ambiguously real other. We found that adding a visual representation was more effect...

Significance The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history—in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of r...

This is the extended material for PNAS 2021

In a side-by-side comparison, we found that the voices of patients who met the criteria for schizophrenia in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and in San Mateo, CA, United States were different. Both groups heard commands. In San Mateo, those commands were often violent, but in Chennai, commands often seemed more to do with everyday activities. Both group...

Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learnin...

The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call 'the mind' may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem 'spiritual'. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parall...

The science of contemplation has focused on mindfulness in a manner quite disproportionate to its use in contemplative traditions. Mindfulness, as understood within the scientific community, is a practice that invites practitioners to disattend to words and images. The practitioner is meant to experience things as they “really are,” unfolding here...

This special issue reports the findings of the Mind and Spirit project. We ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape the ways that people attend to and interpret thoughts and other mental events – and whether their judgements affect their experience of (what they take to be) gods and spirits. We argue in this co...

The Mind and Spirit project found that the way a social world invites its members to experience thought appears to have consequences. When the boundary between inner awareness and outer world is culturally represented as porous, so that thoughts can be construed to move in and out of the mind as if they had agency and power, people are more likely...

The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English‐speakers call ‘the mind’ may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem ‘spiritual’. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parall...

Bridging the gap between cognition and culture, this handbook explores both social scientific and humanities approaches to understanding the physical processes of religious life, tradition, practice, and belief. It reflects the cultural turn within the study of religion and puts theory to the fore, moving beyond traditional theological, philosophic...

Some people seem to have a 'talent' for spiritual experience: they readily sense the presence of supernatural beings, receive special messages from God, and report intense feelings of self-transcendence, awe and wonder. Here we review converging strands of evidence to argue that the trait of 'absorption' captures a general proclivity for having spi...

That trauma can play a significant role in the onset and maintenance of voice-hearing is one of the most striking and important developments in the recent study of psychosis. Yet the finding that trauma increases the risk for hallucination and for psychosis is quite different from the claim that trauma is necessary for either to occur. Trauma is of...

Objective: This study aims to understand the impact of negative life experience (NLE) in auditory hallucinations (AHs) and explain the heterogeneity in phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). Method: In depth interviews were conducted with 21 individuals (7 males and 14 females) experiencing AHs and accessing mental health treatment...

This paper argues for thinking about religious commitments as different in kind from everyday ordinary understandings of the world. It argues against the straightforward assertion from the cognitive science of religion that belief in the supernatural is easy. That is, there is a way in which intuitions of invisible presence come very easily to peop...

The central act of prayer involves paying attention to inner experience-to thoughts, images, and the awareness of the body-and treating those sensations as important in their own right, rather than as distractions from the everyday business of living. There are many metacognitive consequences of this basic act. Its overt features include the redire...

Comment on Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poor cognitive insight in schizophrenia has been linked to delusions, hallucinations, and negative symptoms as well as to depressive/anxiety symptoms. Its impact on quality of life has been less studied, especially in schizophrenia subjects with ongoing auditory hallucinations. The Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS) and the Quality of Life Scale (...

No abstract is available for this article.

There has been great interest in the hallucination-like events experienced by the general nonclinical population. Many psychiatric scientists have come to identify these as part of a “psychotic continuum” and have begun to ask what we might learn from these experiences that will enable us to better understand and treat psychosis. While sympathetic...

The article shows that spiritual experiences, whether sensory or supernatural, are not just triggered or learnt, they occur as part of a “kindling” pattern: events are habituated for individuals and depend on people’s reactivity as well as on social expectations. Supernatural experiences are events that not everyone has, they do not behave as discr...

L’article montre que les expériences spirituelles, qu’elles soient de type sensoriel ou paranormal, ne sont pas simplement déclenchées ou apprises, mais qu’elles participent d’un « embrasement » : les événements font l’objet d’une habituation qui dépend à la fois de la réactivité de l’individu et de l’importance que leur accorde la société. Tout le...

Schizophrenia is a disorder with causes that are endogenous to the body including genetic vulnerability and the decay of neuronal connections. However, there is evidence that individual vulnerability to psychosis is increased by the experiences of discrimination, despair, trauma, and failure. Drawing upon epidemiology and animal biology, this chapt...

Persons with schizophrenia and other serious psychotic disorders often experience a wide range of auditory events. We call them “voices,” but in fact, people hear scratching, buzzing, bells. They hear voices inside their heads and voices that seem to come from outside, from the world. Sometimes the voices are clear; sometimes, indistinct. Sometimes...

To many people in society who struggle with schizophrenia, the mental health system in the United States delivers care that is disgraceful. This is not, it should be said, the care that the health system in some sense ‘intends’ to deliver. Yet care-as-usual has become an “institutional circuit” of prison, shelter, hospital, and transitional housing...

One of the challenges of living with schizophrenia in the United States is the clear identity conferred by the diagnostic label itself. In a society so acutely aware of individual rights, care involves explicit diagnosis. After all, a patient has the right to know. But the label “schizophrenia” is often toxic for those who acquire it. It creates no...

Objective: To investigate the subjective experience of agency in the onset and early development of psychosis.Method: We conducted 19 in-depth interviews with a sample of individuals with self-reported diagnoses of schizophrenia and/or affective psychosis. Interviews focused on participants’ experiences of agency and control in the onset and develo...

Objective: Research concerning the subjective sensory qualities of auditory hallucinations (AH) in people diagnosed with schizophrenia is scarce. Our goal was to investigate the “auditoriness” of AH and their overlap with symptoms grounded in alterations of thought rather than perception. Method: We undertook a detailed analysis of phenomenological...

This study compares 20 subjects, in each of three different settings, with serious psychotic dis- order (they meet inclusion criteria for schizophrenia) who hear voices, and compares their voice- hearing experience. We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience....

Re-Visioning Psychiatry explores new theories and models from cultural psychiatry and psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and anthropology that clarify how mental health problems emerge in specific contexts and points toward future integration of these perspectives. Taken together, the contributions point to the need for fundamental shifts in psyc...

'Thick description' is the term that Geertz used to describe ethnography in one of the most famous and influential anthropology texts in the second half of the twentieth century, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). It has come to imply two different things: on the one hand, good ethnography - what all anthropologists have done and do when they w...

When Erik H. Erikson (for many years the central theorist of identity) wrote about identity, he described it as a kind of consolidation of self, so that when someone achieved her identity, the way she interacted with the world"his or her ability to trust, to work, and to play"was recognized externally by others in a way that was consonant with her...

In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized...

A number of studies have explored hallucinations as complex experiences involving interactions between psychological, biological, and environmental factors and mechanisms. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has focused on the role of culture in shaping hallucinations. This article reviews the published research, drawing on the expertise of b...

Background: We still know little about whether and how the auditory hallucinations associated with serious psychotic disorder shift across cultural boundaries. Aims: To compare auditory hallucinations across three different cultures, by means of an interview-based study. Method: An anthropologist and several psychiatrists interviewed participa...

Responding to the symposia participants, this paper presents data from fieldwork in Accra, Ghana, with a new charismatic church similar to the one described in When God Talks Back. It finds that the broad secular context of the U.S. church and local U.S. culture—particularly, local ideas about the mind—did shape the way congregants represented God...

Many social scientists attribute the health-giving properties of religious practice to social support. This paper argues that another mechanism may be a positive relationship with the supernatural, a proposal that builds upon anthropological accounts of symbolic healing. Such a mechanism depends upon the learned cultivation of the imagination and t...

Abstract A secular observer might assume that prayer practice affects those who pray by making the cognitive concepts about God more salient to their lives. Those who pray, however, often talk as if prayer practice – and in particular, kataphatic (imagination-based) prayer – changes something about their experience of their own minds. This study ex...

How does prayer change the person who prays? In this article, we report on a randomized controlled trial developed to test an ethnographic hypothesis. Our results suggest that prayer which uses the imagination—the kind of prayer practiced in many U.S. evangelical congregations—cultivates the inner senses, and that this cultivation has consequences....

This book is started with the main question, how come some people in the USA believe in an invisible being, that is God. How has belief in God come to influence people’s lives? How has God come to be really present in human life? Almost 100 percent people in the US, believe in God according to a Gallup Poll (Luhrmann, 2012: xi). In addition, religi...

It noted that psychiatrists are taught to listen to people in particular ways: they listen for signals most of us cannot hear, and they look for patterns most of us cannot see. This book describes psychiatrists' 2 primary tasks of diagnosis and psychopharmacology, on the one hand, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, on the other—teach them to listen a...

This article argues that there is an epistemological style associated with much American evangelical Christianity that is strikingly different from that found in never-secular Christianities. This epistemological style is characterized by a playful, self-consciously paradoxical framing of belief-claims in which God’s reality is both clearly affirme...

This essay examines the spaces across societies in which persons with severe mental illness lose meaningful social roles and are reduced to "bare life." Comparing ethnographic and interview data from the United States and India, we suggest that these processes of exclusion take place differently: on the street in the United States, and in the famil...

Why do religions that are in some sense invented out of the western scholarship on shamanism and paganism have such a hold on the western imagination? This article reviews four recent contributions to the literature on neo-paganism and neo-shamanism. As exemplified in the books under review, these religions have three basic characteristics—magical...

The great accomplishment of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James's enduring classic, was to demonstrate that people come to faith not just because they decide that the propositions are true but because they experience God directly. They feel God's presence. They hear God's voice. Their hearts flood with an incandescent joy. Moreover...

Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint. The anthropological evidence suggests that there are three patterns of hallucinations: experiences in which hallucinations are rare, brief, and not distre...