Tongues

[Sarpedon]

No, I am pointing out a place to start in a very large field of study. If you don't like that one, there are plenty of others. Hypnotism is an example of an altered state of conciousness that can be caused by external stimuli. There are similarities between that an religious trances induced by prayer and meditation.

I thought you were interested in learning more.

 

[Angry Floof]

This might be of interest to the genuinely curious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnwGj3tm_zc

Glossolalia never includes sounds not within the speaker's own language. English speakers, for example, have a wide range of sounds to put together in unusual ways, but they don't use sounds that the English language doesn't require.

Linguists (people who make a point of understanding how language works) have innumerable recorded examples of glossolalia to study, yet none of them (that's none as in zero) show any kind of pattern or repeated words or sequences of sounds as every real language has. Some simple sounds repeat, as in 'nanana' or 'mamama' that you might hear when someone is speaking in tongues, but those little staccato-ish noises only sound like foreign language to people who don't know better.

Babbling nonsense is something every human brain is born with the capacity to do, and barring some defect or problem, every human babbles nonsense as a baby. But every baby also soon learns two things about language: that sounds have meaning and that babbling nonsense is not socially acceptable after toddlerhood. The cognitive mechanisms of instinctive baby babbling is probably the same mechanism behind glossolalia, and it's a mechanism that doesn't need conscious intent to happen; it just needs the right brain state and social conditions to temporarily override the early programmed inhibition against babbling.

There's much more to this that is fascinating and quite revealing, and probably a bit embarrassing to people who once thought speaking in tongues is supernatural, but again, to the genuinely curious, there's plenty of literature and commentary from linguists, neuroscientists, and other experts on this topic available.

 

[Politesse]

No, I am pointing out a place to start in a very large field of study. If you don't like that one, there are plenty of others. Hypnotism is an example of an altered state of conciousness that can be caused by external stimuli. There are similarities between that an religious trances induced by prayer and meditation.

I thought you were interested in learning more.

It happens to be my field of study, in fact. What are these "similarities" of which you speak?

 

[Julep]

Scatting by people who can’t jazz.

I always thought the Acts story was intended as a spread the gospel miracle. Go tell the good news to people whose language you can’t speak; gawd will make the right words come out of your mouth. Given the fate of many early missionaries, maybe gawd was playing a bit of a joke, there, because it seems the message many heathens heard was “kill this guy now.”

 

[steve_bank]

Maybe 10 years ago I got invited to a weekly meeting of a group of Evangelicals. About 20 plus kids. I saw laying hands, people having visions, and tongues. Within the meeting there was a normalcy to it.

 

[steve_bank]

Just watched a CSI episode where hypnoticsm was touched on.
Normal awareness is alpha characterized by brain waves. Dream state is beta, Deep sleep is delta.

What a hypnotist does is induce someone into a suggestive beta sate. A shiny object in motion, drone music and incantations and the like. Loud aggressive monotone preaching.

It results in a mental sate direct into the brain. A good preacher can propably induce visions and seeing things.

Back in the 70s I had a class philosophy of religion. The prof;s specialty was Christian mysticism. Apparently there have been mystic traditions in Christians more akin to Buddhist and Hindu practices/

In a class he started speaking in a forceful direct rhythmic voice while tapping on the desk. The class quieted . He stooped and said 200 years ago he would be charged for practicing witchcraft.

 

[Angry Floof]

Something not yet mentioned here I don't think. Brain activity during glossolalia is not the same as in meditation or other focused states of mind. Glossolalia is closer to an ecstatic state, where frontal lobe activity is reduced. In studies of meditators, frontal lobes show high activity.

 

[Sarpedon]

That's a point I'd not heard before, thanks to Angry Floof.

Now since I seem to have put my foot in it, I'll elaborate. Unlike some people here, I don't pontificate about things I know nothing about. However, I'm not an expert, but I feel I've done enough research to reasonably conclude that there are some things going on in religious ritual that affect the worshippers psychologically.

I did point to that article about stepping in sequence on purpose. Rhythmic motions, speech and music are commonplace in religious worship, and have well documented psychological effects. Religious ritual is full of things that are done in unison. When I was a youth, the strictly metered, in unison recitation of the Nicean Creed definitely had a deadening effect. If this is indeed your field of study, I'm sure you don't need to be told about this.

A second point that I alluded to was the point of hypnosis. Hypnosis is often entered into by droning speech and repetitive actions, as above. I don't need to say that these phenomena are common in religious ritual. Are people in church being hypnotized? Not necessarily. See conclusions below.

Meditation. Common in every religion in some form or another. Not much to say about it, other than it seems amazing to one who might not understand what is happening on a neurological level. Turning the unusual into the miraculous is common among religious practitioners. Even common things are said to be miraculous. When I was in Sunday School, I was told that the 'warm fuzzy' feeling we get sometimes is god speaking to us, and the 'cold prickly' feeling is temptation from Satan. Later I realized that these were simply emotions, and I haven't stopped having them since I became an Atheist. Misrepresenting psychological phenomena as spiritual ones is common. The rather amazing feeling one gets when meditating is misrepresented in this way.

Infrasound. Sound waves below the threshold of conscious human hearing are thought to produces feelings of unease among people. One researcher said 'awe' instead, but lets go with unease, that feeling that something is happening without being conciously aware of what. Why do I mention this? What relevance does this have to religious worship? Its not like churches are equipped with something that creates infrasound that is used during religious rituals, right? Except that they are. For the last thousand years, most christian churches have been equipped with such a device; the Pipe Organ. Before you scoff, I challenge you to go to a church with a large organ, and ask for the organist to play for you some notes from its lowest register.

Conclusion: There seem to be an awful lot of things that are known to have psychological effects on people happening in religious ritual. It would be irresponsible to say that this, repeated weekly (and in previous ages, daily) would have no effect on the worshippers. This is not to say that every worshipper is constantly hypnotized while undergoing the ritual. Speaking from my own experience with religious ritual, I would surmise that the combined effect of all these things is to create a feeling that worship is special and unusual. Also, combined with the tendency of people to associate feelings with places, these feelings are transferred to the physical building where these things happen, and by extension, to the thing it represents.

Furthermore, I can also report that while generally I maintained my usual mental state in church, once in a while, I DID experience something unusual there, consistent with what I have discussed above. Suppose these stimuli, while generally producing mild or no effects, every once in a while produce an altered state in a worshipper. Would that not be interpreted as a spiritual experience? Would not people who are more susceptible to these things, experience them more often, and might thus feel a 'calling' to make career out of it? And might those people, with their heightened sensitivity, then tune the ritual over the years to make it more and more effective? Is anything I've said unreasonable?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Whatever stimulates the brain is good for the brain. All other things being equal that's how the brain gets its exercise, grows, strengthens, maintains vigor.

So even something as idiotic as babbling and rolling about, essentially role playing and acting, is good stuff for the human brain. There's nothing spooky involved here or religious or otherworldly, spiritual, demonic, no long dead demigods or aliens visiting and communicating with us. It's just normal human physiology.

Now no one wants to hear that and get the cold bucket of water in the face, especially a religious person heavily into woo who thinks they're having a religious experience. In short, there's nothing religious about a religious experience.

 

[steve_bank]

From a Tbetan scripture translation I read one practice is to enter the dream sate at will.

In a study of sensory isolation it appears without stimulus the brain will create it. Auditory and visual halucinations.

I teed Center Of The Cyclone by John Lilly way back. He combined LSD with saltwater flotation tanks. I thought the movie Altered Sates came from the book.

Lilly described vivid hallucinations. Meeting historic figures and having conversations.

 

[Sarpedon]

Are the experts in this field not going to come and debunk my amateur claims?

 

[Politesse]

Are the experts in this field not going to come and debunk my amateur claims?

I don't see anything wrong with what you wrote.

 

[Sarpedon]

Now I did not ever attend the same kind of hand waving, tongues shouting church as here. Perhaps someone who has can fill us in on the specific psychological manipulation going on?

 

[steve_bank]

In a sense the Fateful Dead concert I went to in the 70s was a manipulation of sort. The Dead Heads traveled following concerts attaching a kind of mysticism to the band. Ritual dancing mostly drug induced.

The manipulation of religion is not unique. Today's politics are a painful example.

 

[Copernicus]

This might be of interest to the genuinely curious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnwGj3tm_zc

Glossolalia never includes sounds not within the speaker's own language. English speakers, for example, have a wide range of sounds to put together in unusual ways, but they don't use sounds that the English language doesn't require.

Linguists (people who make a point of understanding how language works) have innumerable recorded examples of glossolalia to study, yet none of them (that's none as in zero) show any kind of pattern or repeated words or sequences of sounds as every real language has. Some simple sounds repeat, as in 'nanana' or 'mamama' that you might hear when someone is speaking in tongues, but those little staccato-ish noises only sound like foreign language to people who don't know better.

Babbling nonsense is something every human brain is born with the capacity to do, and barring some defect or problem, every human babbles nonsense as a baby. But every baby also soon learns two things about language: that sounds have meaning and that babbling nonsense is not socially acceptable after toddlerhood. The cognitive mechanisms of instinctive baby babbling is probably the same mechanism behind glossolalia, and it's a mechanism that doesn't need conscious intent to happen; it just needs the right brain state and social conditions to temporarily override the early programmed inhibition against babbling.

There's much more to this that is fascinating and quite revealing, and probably a bit embarrassing to people who once thought speaking in tongues is supernatural, but again, to the genuinely curious, there's plenty of literature and commentary from linguists, neuroscientists, and other experts on this topic available.

That's largely correct, although I've noticed that glossolalia often entails a few nonnative sounds such as trilled /r/ sounds in American English speakers. It's probably best to analyze glossolalia in terms of repeated syllable combinations rather than individual phonemic segments. This is a very interesting phenomenon that has occurred throughout recorded history in a wide variety of cultures.

When I worked in linguistics departments, we would often get phone calls or walk-ins from people who wanted to know which language a sample of glossolalia represented. Not surprisingly, they tended not to be receptive to the message that they were listening to strings of English nonsense syllables with a few "foreign" sounds thrown in. One never encounters the range of articulation that can occur naturally in other languages. If the speaker speaks English, then you don't usually get imploded or glottalized consonants. I suppose it really depends on what foreign languages the speaker has encountered. So someone raised in a Vietnamese family might use imploded stops, but I have no experience to back up this speculation. It is a very interesting phenomenon from a linguistic perspective.

 

[Potoooooooo]