Voluntary and involuntary motor behaviours in the varieties of religious experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Religion is a widespread feature of human life. Religions typically include both distinctive varieties of experience and also a set of foundational beliefs. An additional, but often overlooked, part of many religions is their expression through specific actions, which we here designate religious motor behaviours. Here we describe these religious motor behaviours and offer a taxonomy based on the conceptual schemes of movement neuroscience and neurology. Thus, religious rituals include both behaviours characterized by decreased motor output (e.g. ritualistic silence) and behaviours characterized by increased motor output (e.g. ritual dances). Neurology often also distinguishes between movements that are experienced as voluntary or involuntary. We show that this same distinction can also apply to religious experiences, since these may be characterized either by a heightened sense of personal control or a sense of being controlled by an external, divine source. We then use these conceptual structures of movement neuroscience to investigate examples from a wide range of religious contexts. We thereby categorize religious motor behaviours into different classes, focusing on specific examples: repetitive ritual actions; motor behaviours where the experience of volition is altered, such as automatisms; and possession-like states. We suggest that a scientific approach to these behaviours should include their predominant phenomenological presentation, the accompanying subjective experience of volition and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. This investigation shows rich parallels between religious motor behaviours and motor behaviours observed in neurological disorders, including those that present with functional neurological symptoms. Our approach does not and should not pathologize religious motor behaviours, but rather draws attention to a rich set of non-clinical motor phenomena that highlights important social, cultural and psychological elements of human movement control. Movement neuroscience and religious activity have unexplored overlaps and can usefully learn from each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".