Voices of the Gods: How We Lost Our Minds to Agriculture

Our Gods: Variation in Supernatural Minds

In this chapter we examine variation in the contents of supernatural minds across cultures and the social correlates of this variation. We first provide a sketch of how humans are capable of representing supernatural minds and emphasize the significance of the types of knowledge attributed to supernatural agents. We then argue that the contents of supernatural minds as represented cross-cultura...

How gesture works to change our minds.

When people talk, they gesture. We now know that these gestures are associated with learning-they can index moments of cognitive instability and reflect thoughts not yet found in speech. But gesture has the potential to do more than just reflect learning-it might be involved in the learning process itself. This review focuses on two non-mutually exclusive possibilities: (1) The gestures we see ...

Perceiving Minds and Gods: How Mind Perception Enables, Constrains, and Is Triggered by Belief in Gods.

Most people believe in the existence of empirically unverifiable gods. Despite apparent heterogeneity, people's conceptions of their gods center on predictable themes. Gods are overwhelmingly represented as intentional agents with (more or less) humanlike mental lives. This article reviews converging evidence suggesting that this regularity in god concepts exists in part because the ability to ...

How we know our conscious minds: Introspective access to conscious thoughts

Four different accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of them endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. Section 1 of this target article in...

Raising our voices to say who we are.