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.