The future of perceptual phenomena
From witchcraft to shamans to those with schizophrenia, voices and visions have always been part of human experience and they have always intrigued anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann.
She now studies how various cultures understand these mysterious mental phenomena. Luhrmann has observed and talked to hundreds who’ve experienced voices and visions and learned there are “different pathways” to understand them, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Tanya Luhrmann: Rather than thinking of psychosis as something that's really, really different, all of us could be a little bit psychotic, and maybe, you know, the people that I was studying were just able to manage their experience more effectively. And they became very excited because there was the question, people were also interested in early psychosis, and they thought, I think correctly, that the way the surrounding community responds to somebody who's fallen ill may shape the experience of their voices.
[00:00:40] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host Russ Altman. If you're enjoying the show in any way, please consider sharing it with friends, families, and colleagues. Personal recommendations are one of the best ways to help spread the word, about the show and its advantages.
[00:00:58] Today, Professor Tanya Luhrmann will tell us about hearing voices, having visions, and other supernatural experiences. It's the future of cool, weird experiences.
[00:01:11] Before we get started, a reminder that if you're enjoying the show, please share it with family, friends, and colleagues. Recommendations are a way to spread The Future of Everything.
[00:01:20] When people talk about hearing voices or having visions or supernatural experiences, sometimes it gets you nervous. That's associated with mental disease, but you know what? These experiences are extremely common and exist on a spectrum from people who do have, um, documented and diagnosed mental illnesses all the way to many people who don't. It can be part of faith experiences, it can be part of non-faith, strongly held beliefs.
[00:01:58] These things can be healthy for you. They can lead to experiences that feel very real, and even can lead to relationships with imaginary figures that feel very real. Many of these issues become pertinent today with AI chatbots, where people are starting to really hear them, but then have deep relationships with them.
[00:02:18] Well, Professor Tanya Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology and psychology at Stanford University and she's an expert at visions, voices, the supernatural, and interactions with mental health.
[00:02:31] Tanya, what got you interested in studying visions, voices, and the supernatural, and their connections with mental health?
[00:02:38] Tanya Luhrmann: When I was a graduate student, I went to a department that was very philosophical. I was at Cambridge, and my advisors were trained in philosophy in the anthropology department. My best friends were philosophers, and the anthropology book that the philosophers liked best was a book that explained how apparently rational, apparently reasonable people could believe in apparently unreasonable beliefs.
[00:03:05] And that was, um, Evans Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, a traditional, so-called traditional people in the southern Sudan. And they had lots of ideas about people who had malevolent thoughts which could go out of their bodies and affect other people. And so, much philosophical discussion, and many of the answers circled around the observation that these Azande people didn't have, weren't literate and hadn't been exposed to science.
[00:03:39] And so I thought it would be clever, interesting, fruitful to go to London and talk to people who thought of themselves as practicing witchcraft and magic and sort of Kabbalistic mysticism. And what I found when I arrived in these sort of secretive groups, it was that belief wasn't actually very important. What really mattered was that you did the practices, you learned how to do magic, and in the doing of the magic, you started experiencing magic. You started feeling magical force.
[00:04:16] You felt the magic flow through your veins. You, people saw things that other people couldn't see, they sometimes heard voices. I was, did these practices for nine months. I went to a, what was it called? Pagan Pathfinders. It was kind of a cult exercise group. I did an exercise for like fifteen minutes a day for another group where I was in my mind's eye. I was leaving my body and going to a garden in the sky and planting in this garden, there's a chalice and this and that.
[00:04:53] Anyway, after about nine months of this, I was immersed in a book on Arthurian Britain and I woke up and I saw six druids standing by the window. And so it was a perceptual experience. I kind of slipped out of bed and they disappeared. But it felt like a perception. And that became the rabbit that I've been pursuing for the last, I don't know, four decades. I mean, it would just, you know, that people have these experiences.
[00:05:22] Russ Altman: Yes, yes.
[00:05:22] Tanya Luhrmann: It turns out that a lot of people have these experiences. They, you know, some people more than others. I mean, now, these days, I and my team, there are three factors we identify, which we think makes it more likely that you have one of these experiences.
[00:05:39] There's a question of whether they're mad or whether they're not mad. I don't think they are, but I think, you know, there's a story. There are different pathways through which people have them. A bunch of people have odd experiences. And for some people, they really matter.
[00:05:53] Russ Altman: So that is, I wanted to get to this issue of, you said you've been pursuing it now for many years. How, as an anthropologist, what is the toolkit that you bring to studying these things? What is the approach to studying and understanding these phenomena?
[00:06:07] Tanya Luhrmann: So the primary toolkit, the toolkit I was using through, really, three or four books, was participant observation. I sit there, I talk to people, I immerse myself, I do what they do, and I ask them careful phenomenological questions. Phenomenology with a small p. I mean, I'm not, I'm no of the continental philosophers. But it's really like you say that you heard God's voice. Where was he located? Was he in a particular place? Did you hear it with your ears? Did it feel like it was outside your head or inside your head? How did you know that it was God's voice? What led you, and what you wanted to do is get through the theological stuff. You know, people tell you that a lot of ideas about God, and you want to get to what it feels like, what happens in the experience for people.
[00:07:04] Russ Altman: When you do this, you're an anthropologist, is it culturally variable? Or are we seeing, or do you see kind of remarkable similarities across cultures? And, uh, I'm interested in understanding the degree to which this can be a function of language, culture, local phenomenon, versus a function of the human mind.
[00:07:23] Tanya Luhrmann: What's a great question. This is the thing that obsesses me. So I did my first work in London. I wrote a book about the community, the Zoroastrians, and what was then Bombay. I hung out with psychiatrists and learned how to do some other techniques, but I was trying to understand how they came to see mental illness. I wrote a book in which I was really leaning into the experience about American evangelicals. And then I did a large project in which we were looking at the way that people had these experiences and the way they thought about their mind in five different cultures. In the U.S., in Ghana, in Thailand, in China, Shanghai, and, you know, Points West. And in Vanuatu, and of course, we're looking, you know, I'm talking about huge samples for us. I mean, we were talking to like hundreds and hundreds of people. But in the context of global populations, pretty small sample. And so, I do have something to say, and at the while I was doing that, I was also talking to people about who hear voices, meet criteria for schizophrenia. And I wanted to know what's the content of the voices.
[00:08:38] And so there's a story to tell about, let's call them the non-clinical experiences. And a story to tell about the clinical experiences. Of course, there's kind of a puzzle about the relationship between the clinical and non-clinical. So, let me start with the clinical because it's kind of, in some sense, more straightforward. And again, tiny samples. What I'm doing here is just talking to people. I show up in a hospital or at a place outside a hospital. I know that these people have been diagnosed with schizophrenia according to international standards. And I just say, you know, they have to be voice hearers, and you know, sixty, eighty percent of people that meet criteria for schizophrenia hear voices. And I say, tell me what you experience. And it's, you know, people who have psychosis are sometimes not the easiest people to talk to. But I really wanted to know, and we talked and talked, but I really wanted to know, are there any positive experiences? Because many people with psychosis hear negative voices, but sometimes they have positive voices. I wanted to know, have you met in the flesh the person whose voice you're hearing. And I wanted to know what the voices commanded them to do. It's very, very common that people who meet criteria feel commanded. So, what I saw, or what I've seen so far, Americans, so everybody, there's something very common in these experiences. And when people are really ill, it's like many, many questions about schizophrenia. When people are really ill, they all look the same. I mean, that's not quite true.
[00:10:26] Tanya Luhrmann: But people have dramatic mistakes in their perceptions, and dramatic mistakes in their thoughts. According to observers, people in America are much more likely than other communities to report that they are hearing violent commands. Commands to hurt themselves and to hurt other people. So everybody out there in the world, some people report commands to hurt. But it's like, you know, I worked with samples of twenty, and now I have several samples of twenty in the States. But in the first sample, sixteen out of the twenty.
[00:11:01] In Chennai, and mostly they don't know who's talking. They haven't met the person, for the most part, in my samples. In Chennai, they hear their family. They hear their father, mother, sister, ancestors, and they have a lot of household commands, like clean up, eat, you know, get dressed. And they're much more likely to say they like the voice, it's annoying because they don't necessarily want to stop drinking and stop smoking and get dressed. But they know who's talking, it's their mom. In Ghana, if I was in Accra and Cape Coast, people are much more likely to talk about God. All the Americans are religious, but in Ghana and, you know, people are more likely to say, you know, it's God that's protecting me from this problem that has me in the hospital. God is my refuge. In Shanghai, people heard Mao. They heard Chiang Kai-shek. They're political operatives. In East, in the Kazan, Mao's not in the room in Kazan. Um, but there's a very, you know, fluent Russians, fluent in Russian Stanford student who's there. They have, there's a lot of folkloric themes.
[00:12:16] Russ Altman: Huh.
[00:12:16] Tanya Luhrmann: So, flying swans and, you know, sort of birds. And in Chiang Mai in Thailand, people talked a lot about mindfulness. So they talked about, you know, if only they managed their minds better. They would not have this experience and the thing that rushed in rushed in from the forest.
[00:12:40] Russ Altman: So there's definitely, from what you're describing, tell me if I'm hearing this correctly, there's definitely cultural reflections in these auditory experiences that they're having, but it's only a reflection, like it also is very personalized.
[00:12:55] Tanya Luhrmann: Yes, what you're seeing is an individual starts having these experiences. This is what we think is happening. They start some kind of an array, a wash of auditory stuff. They probably hear, "shwshwshwsh", they hear good voices and bad voices. They hear shouting voices, they hear commanding voices. And they start to, I think what we see is that they start to shape those experiences. And probably, that shaping may affect prognosis, so it's hard to prove that. We know that schizophrenia has a more benign prognosis outside of, well, at least in India. Arguably outside of the West and it may shape that.
[00:13:42] Russ Altman: So as you've been doing this work, there's been lots of advances in neuroscience and in medical psychiatry. And I'm wondering how has that, does that inform your interpretation of this? Or is that very orthogonal to the way you're approaching these and understanding them? I don't know if, for example, have neuroscience capabilities in measuring the brain or fMRI or anything, have they, influenced or changed the way you interpret this? Or do you feel like no, that's kind of a different issue. It's a kind of medicalization of these phenomenon and that's fine for somebody else, but that's not what I'm doing.
[00:14:23] Tanya Luhrmann: I'm actually pretty comfortable hanging out with doctors and with psychiatric scientists. And I began doing my serious hanging out with these people are serious conversations And I now publish in psychiatric journals and I collaborate with psychiatric scientists. I came to their notice, and I published this book on evangelical Christians. This was before I did, started working, doing a five-country study. And I had added psychology measures to my work. And I was arguing that some people, when people say they hear God speaking, that sometimes it's an actual perceptual experience. It feels perceptual and they judge it as perceptual.
[00:15:10] And that was at a time when the psychiatric science world in Europe was very interested in the continuum of psychosis. So they were interested in the question of whether rather than thinking of psychosis as something that's really, really different, all of us could be a little bit psychotic. And maybe, you know, the people that I was studying were just able to manage their experience more effectively. And they became very excited because there was the question people were also interested in early psychosis. And they thought, I think correctly, that the way the surrounding community responds to somebody who's fallen ill may shape the experience of their voices.
[00:15:59] I think all that's true, I just don't think it explains many of my evangelicals. But it turns out that there is, there are deep puzzles in trying to understand that. Now I collaborate and spend time with people and I think we are coming to a consensus that there are multiple pathways to these experiences. So the person has done the, my experience, some of the richest neuroscience work is this young psychologist at Yale called Phil Corlett. And he has been doing these clever experiments comparing people who clearly are clinically ill and have voice hearing experiences, and people who do not appear to be clinically ill, but still have voice like experiences.
[00:16:46] And for that, for him, he's talking to spiritualist mediums who don't end up in the psychiatric world. And there are ways in which their experience of voices are alike, and ways in which they're not alike. And so we're trying to sort of talk together about how to tease that apart and talk. And we're also talking as part of this larger group that includes Christian philosophers and other, you know, vision scientists, trying to figure out, well, the training that I see ethnographically, what's involved with that? And what is it actually training?
[00:17:25] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Tanya Luhrmann next.
[00:17:45] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm your host, Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Tanya Luhrmann from Stanford University.
[00:17:52] In the last segment, Tanya told us about people who hear voices or have visions and how that relates to culture, and to mental illness, and to not mental illness.
[00:18:01] In this segment, we're going to talk about the non-clinical manifestations. This is for people who do not achieve any medical diagnosis and yet still have voices, visions, and supernatural experiences. Tanya will tell us about that. She'll tell us about the people who emerge as leaders among those who have these kinds of experiences. And she'll end with some reflections on AI and what that might mean for our relationships and our experiences going forward.
[00:18:30] So, I also want to go to non-clinical considerations where it never reaches the, I guess, the level where a physician or, uh, a medical person, uh, needs to get involved. And I was really struck very early in the conversation you said that the magicians told you that the way to, this is my interpretation of what you said, the way to believe in magic is just start doing it, and then it will become magical. And that really struck a chord for me because that's exactly how some people who have deep faith, like the way to exercise your deep faith as a Christian or Muslim or Jew is to dive in, um, experience the faith, and that faith will then grow in that context.
[00:19:08] So I want to talk to you about the, um, the non-clinical portion of hearing voices or having visions or having supernatural experiences. Because I know that's a big part of what you study. So how should we think about those?
[00:19:21] Tanya Luhrmann: Well, I think that these are, in effect, the consequences of vivid imagination. I think that there's some stories, so I now have spent time with people practicing magic, evangelical Christians, people who created mystical friends, Baal teshuvah Jews, Jews who are coming back to a renewed faith in orthodox faith, people practicing Santeria. I mean all kinds, a lot of different people, and I think in some one sense they all talk about practice, and their practice all involves three things.
[00:19:56] There's some kind of expectation, call it faith, call it belief, you know, you're gonna, it's easier. People have spontaneous spiritual or supernatural experiences, but if you expect them, it's a little easier, uh, and if you're practicing, you want, you should be expecting that there's some kind of interaction and engagement. There is a mental imagery cultivation part, or really an inner sense cultivation part. So people, when they're doing informal prayer, when they're doing the magical path working, when they're doing, you know, mystical Kabbalah, they're seeing in their mind's eye, and they're trying to have as vivid an experience as they possibly can.
[00:20:40] Evangelicals have talked to me about feeling the heat on their cheeks from standing in the throne room. So they're really seeking vivid sensory experiences. And the third thing they're doing is talking as if the invisible being will talk back. And, and all now, which is doing the greater work, I spent some time talking to people who create invisible friends without any metaphysical commitments. These are called tulpa masters. Their invisible friend is a tulpa and they are really, they do not start with the idea that this has to do with God or the supernatural or anything, they purely see it as a technique. You go onto their website and there, there's book after book that teaches you how to do it, what they say. And we flew twenty-five people out to California and talked to them, and my neuroscientific postdoc went off and scanned their brains while talking to their tulpas. What they say, or this group said, was that the as if practice, which they're calling narration, is easier than the mental imagery cultivation and it works, but if you don't do the mental imagery cultivation, it doesn't get anchored. There's something important about the inner experience of the, of these events.
[00:22:03] Russ Altman: Well, so that's great. So the three just to review, it was an expectation, a seeking, and kind of a as if immersion in the experience. Uh, what about, um, people who are very good at this and who become leaders, shamans so to speak, um, do they, are they really good at these three activities?
[00:22:24] Tanya Luhrmann: Yes. In the work, we find three factors, um, that sort of predict whether you vividly have these experiences. One factor is whether you can get immersed in your inner world, whether you can get absorbed. Another factor is how much practice you are doing, how many, in a Christian context, how many minutes per day you pray. And the third is something about expectation, whether you're willing to model your thought as potent and model your mind as open to the world, if you have a porous boundary between your mind and your world. So the people who become leaders are, in my experience, more able to become caught up in their inner world, they're more likely to understand their mind world boundaries of course, and they're doing a lot of practice.
[00:23:17] People are complicated, not everybody's the same. You know, leaders are also good at being leaders, uh, so there, there's much to say. And also, I think some people who in these very intense leadership roles might be people who are vulnerable to psychosis. Who are using these imaginative techniques to manage and control the psychosis. I think it's, you know, I think there's a complicated story to tell.
[00:23:43] Russ Altman: Really interesting. And, um, I've heard people say that many of our high-tech CEOs, uh, three hundred years ago would have been cult leaders. That gets us into a whole different discussion. But I did want to make sure we touch base on AI.
[00:23:59] And I know, like, this is a big pivot and forgive me. But in your work and in your writing, you talk about when the people have these experiences, not only is it a very real sensation, but it is often repetitive, repeating, and it often creates relationships. And these are very real relationships, just as the ones, I think you use the word tulpa. Uh, and that the relationships with these, um, imaginary friends, uh, and I won't talk about my childhood friend named Russ Mouse, although I have a huge desire to do so, but we'll put that aside.
[00:24:30] Um, that these are real relationships. And now we're starting to see these technologies where we're reading about and hearing about people claiming very strong relationships, um, not with, um, uh, imagined or, internal voices, but with chatbots. And I'm wondering if you have a perspective on that, given all the studies you've been doing about how these relationships form with things or experiences that other people would say, you can't have a relationship with that because it's not real. And yet the relationships are very real to those experiencing them.
[00:25:03] Tanya Luhrmann: So I think that people have many epistemic frames. They have many ways of judging something to be real or not real. I also think that feeling real is kind of an emotion. So you can judge something as not being real, but it still feels real to you. So, uh, the more time, there's something deeply human that we don't quite understand yet in which people, it's relatively easy for people to describe sentience. It's relatively easy to have a sense that there is this, this being who is responding.
[00:25:48] It's relatively hard to maintain that sense over time. So you know, people pretty easily have the sense that there's a God who is present. It's pretty hard to have a sense that God is present and responsive and engaged with me all the time. And that requires a certain amount of effort. These new chatbots, and I think what's so interesting is, you know, if a chatbot is an existing puppy dog, it's a robotic puppy dog, it's there all the time.
[00:26:21] So I would be curious about the limits of the realness. So people, for even very, very devout Christians, but they don't ask their God to feed the dog, right, there are limits. People are, you know, and they absolutely tell you absolutely this is real, but they don't do certain things. The tulpa masters are, um, struck by the fact that after some practice their invisible friend starts to really feel real and behaves in a way that feels autonomous. You have to do a lot of effort to get that, that tulpa to talk back to you in a way that feels like it's not your voice. But people don't marry their tulpas, for the most part. And while that's not, that's part of the culture, there are certainly possession, cultural worlds where people marry their spirit.
[00:27:12] But not everybody marries their spirit. So there are these frames. And I don't think I know much about the limits of the realness for the AI chatbot. But I do think that we have evidence, so far, that these relationships can be quite good for people. They can reduce loneliness. Loneliness is one of the greatest health risks people experience. They can provide a sense of companionship. They often give, in my experience, better advice then people give to themselves. And it's like, it's really kind of striking. It's, uh, people know what good advice to give themselves, but they don't really follow it. But you know, if you're a tulpa, your tulpa gives you good, good advice and to some extent you follow it.
[00:28:04] Russ Altman: Fantastic. That's actually, uh, that's so what you're saying, if I'm just to repeat back and make sure, is that yes, there are, uh, mental health implications and, but, uh, at a low level, having this ability or this experience can actually be physically, medically, healthy.
[00:28:22] Tanya Luhrmann: But it has limits and the healthy person also understands the limits. Like, the healthy person doesn't want to marry Siri. The healthy person, you know, it's, um, the healthy person is able to kind of frame the experience.
[00:28:40] Russ Altman: Thanks to Tanya Luhrmann. That was the future of cool, weird experiences.
[00:28:45] Thanks also for tuning into this episode. With over 250 episodes in our archive, you have access to an amazing array of discussions on The Future of Everything. If you're enjoying the show, or if it's helped you in any way, please consider rating and reviewing it. We like fives, but give us what you feel we deserve to share your thoughts. You can connect with me on XR Twitter @RBAltman, and you can connect with Stanford Engineering @StanfordENG.
