Shifting Between Models of Mind: New Insights Into How Human Minds Give Rise to Experiences of Spiritual Presence and Alternative Realities

Phenomenal experiences of immaterial spiritual beings-hearing the voice of God, seeing the spirit of an ancestor-are a valuable and largely untapped resource for the field of cognitive science. Such experiences, we argue, are experiences of the mind, tied to mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes about the mind, and thus provide a striking example of how, with the right combination of mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes, one's own thoughts and inner sensations can be experienced as coming from somewhere or someone else. In this paper, we present results from a large-scale study of U.S. adults (N = 1779) that provides new support for our theory that spiritual experiences are facilitated by a dynamic interaction between mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes: A person is more likely to hear God speak if they have the epistemic flexibility and cultural support to shift, temporarily, away from a mundane model of mind into a more "porous" way of thinking and being. This, in turn, lays the foundation for a meditation on how mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes might also interact to facilitate other phenomena of interest to cognitive science, such as fiction writing and scientific discovery.