The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
Corrigan, The Dressed Society; Clothing, the body and some meanings of the world (London: Sage, 2008), 155.
Chapter 1
The Cognitive Turn
The study of the Bible is heavily influenced by other disciplines, even if it often takes a good deal of time before insights from other scholarly approaches can make meaningful inroads. Literary methods such as Marxist and feminist readings, for example, only began to be significantly used by biblical scholars two decades after they became commonplace in the study of other literature.[1] With this in mind, it might not seem surprising that biblical studies lags behind other fields within the humanities in utilizing and adapting insights from various cognitive approaches. Within the last decade, however, there have been a few notable exceptions and much more material is being produced. Many of these efforts have greatly influenced this project with regard to method, if not necessarily direct content. One of the first and most important examples is Ellen J. Van Wolde’s 2009 work which uses cognitive linguistics and cognitive relationality to examine several texts from the Hebrew Bible.[2] More recently, scholars have produced several books, articles, and edited volumes that attempt to draw from the various approaches, with a particular focus on rituals. Here we find important texts such as Cognitive Science and the New Testament and Mind, Morality and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies, which seek to understand religion and religious practice primarily through the study of the cognitive constraints that shape them, largely directed at examining the origins of religious thought, the transmission and perseverance of these ideas, and religious acts and rituals.[3]
The work of several scholars will be discussed further in this chapter, which will first examine the emergence of cognitive science, the cognitive turn in the humanities, and then the cognitive science of religion. I will also introduce two important aspects of cognition, the theory of mind (mentalizing) and agency detection, which are important to the discussion of human embodiment and the intuitive dualism that impacts religion and religious texts discussed in later chapters. Finally, I will cite examples of how insights from cognitive science are helping to better understand religion, and religious texts and practices.
The Cognitive Revolution
Cognitive science is the scientific interdisciplinary study of the mind, with its origins in computer sciences and Chomskyan linguistics, and drawing on technological developments, such a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It should not be understood as a distinct discipline, but rather as the intersection of many disciplines. In order to see how the cognitive sciences are being used in biblical studies, it is necessary to outline some of the main approaches, themes and scholars working in cognitive science, how it is applied more broadly to the humanities, and the study of religion in particular.
Because many working in cognitive science are focused on different aspects and in numerous fields, they have various definitions or approaches to cognitive science. Also, because their readers may be unfamiliar with cognitive science, they regularly spend significant space on definition and explaining methods before outlining its role in their specific discipline. One very simple view of the work of cognitive scientists is to describe the brain as a machine or computer that they are trying to understand.[4] In this approach, the focus is directed toward computation or information processing.[5] Similarly, Justin Barrett defines cognitive science as “consider[ing] what the human mind is and how it functions; how people think.”[6] While this definition could seem so broad as to cover almost all human behavior, it does not. For example, bodily functions such as sneezing and yawning would not be included in this definition.[7] However, this still leaves much undefined. A more complete definition of cognitive science describes it as an attempt to explain
the kinds of perceptual and conceptual representations that the mental processing of sensory input allows, the memory, the transmission and transformations of these mental representations, the relationships among them, and the ways in which some of these mental representations become public.[8]
Luther Martin goes on to elaborate the different aspects of mental function as non-conscious, conscious, and metarepresentational. An example of non-conscious mental functionings is our ability to see color through the discernment of the light-reflective qualities of objects in our environment and the construction of a mental representation coded for color.[9] These functionings can also be conscious, as when we recognize and represent objects in our environment to others. We can also represent non-existent objects, such as those not present, those with no existence (e.g., unicorns), or those that only exist as future possibilities.[10] Humans can even represent our own representations. This metarepresentation allows us to reflect upon our representations, categorizing and comparing them, making critical judgments and discerning fact from fiction.[11] These definitions raise several issues that must be discussed in greater detail, namely the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and the relationship between the mind and the brain or, even more broadly, the mind and body.
The origins of cognitive science lie in many fields. In fact, cognitive science should be understood as a collaboration rather than a discrete field of study. It is the “fruitful synergies” of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and neuroscience, none of which alone could hope to address the pressing open questions of cognitive science.[12] While not everyone in these diverse fields who works on these issues would consider themselves scientists, they generally could be regarded as cognitive scientists when they utilize scientifically collected data to evaluate “claims and predictions about how humans think and the character of the human mind, and attempt to discover naturalistic explanations for the phenomena the data reveal.”[13]
One of the constituent fields of cognitive science is neuroscience. Cognitive science and neuroscience are often used incorrectly as interchangeable terms, a lack of distinction that mirrors the equally incorrect interchangeability of the terms brain and mind. The rise of cognitive science is roughly contemporary with the development of personal computing and drawing analogies between the brain and the computer have proved very helpful.[14] One can easily find many news articles referring to some aspect of human behavior as being ‘hardwired.’[15] In this analogy, the brain is hardware, and the mind is software. While it is useful to know where in the brain certain types of processes occur, as Barrett points out, “cognitive science . . . isn’t really about brains at all. It is about minds.”[16] However, just because the brain and mind are conceptually distinct, this does not mean that they are meaningfully separable.[17]
Some of the greatest advances in cognitive science have occurred when brain injuries, surgeries, or non-neurotypical conditions have significantly impacted individual personalities or abilities. For example, a traumatic brain injury can cause a significant change in behavior, such as inducing pathological gambling.[18] An example perhaps more to the point for this project, individuals on the autistic spectrum can find it difficult to understand the thoughts and intentions of others, an aspect of what we will discuss below as theory of mind. This skill, which is essential both for reading works of fiction and for developing religious beliefs, is frequently studied.[19] But one does not even need to examine such significant examples to recognize the everyday experience of the body impacting the mind. Physical events and feelings affect the cognitive processing of information. Hunger and tiredness, or substances such as caffeine and alcohol can affect performance of simple tasks, memory, and personality. These are obvious examples that most of us have experience with. Others are less common and perhaps more surprising. For example, following Botox (botulinum toxin A) injections, subjects reading sentences that stimulate negative emotions process those thoughts more slowly than those who have not had their facial muscles impaired.[20] An example that impacts all of us, but of which we are generally unaware, is the impact of gut bacteria on our brain, an area of research which is now exploding.[21] Moreover, it is not only the body that affects the mind, the mind can also affect the body, as is seen in examples of anxiety-induced muscle tension or spasms. Here again I am reminded of the account cited in the introduction in which the act of reading induced vomiting. One of the foundational tenets