strategy that ‘aim highest (by attributing the most organization and hence significance to
things and events) have the greatest potential payoffs and lowest risks’ (Guthrie 1993, 6).
Indeed as Guthrie characteristically observe ‘it is better for a hiker to be mistake a
boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder’ (Guthrie 1993, 6). If one wants to
take this argument a step further the question to ask is what cognitive mechanism can
account or explain animism. Attempting to offer a possible direction for answering that I
suggest that animism, as a cognitive process, should be seen as a part of that aspect of
human social intelligence that goes under the name Theory of Mind (ToM). Theory of
Mind (ToM) or mentalizing (thinking about the contents of other people’s minds) refers
to the process(es) by which humans attribute unobservable mental states to others
(Gallagher and Frith 2002; Frith and Frith 2003; Vogeley et al. 2001; Leslie 1987). ToM
comprise the mental processes which allow us to apprehend the psychological properties
and beliefs of another and thus what enables social relations as well as agency attribution.
For many years the crucial question for cognitive neurosciences has been whether
ToM, and by extension human social cognition, draws on a unique and specialized set of
cognitive processes and networks, evolved to deal with the human social domain, or
whether ToM and social cognition simply represent a special instance of more general-
purpose cognitive processes, like those involved in perception, language, memory etc. A
number of recent imaging studies support the view of a distinct social cognition network,
the neural correlates of which can be found primarily in the medial prefrontal cortex
(mPFC) (e.g. Mitchell et al. 2005). But even if we accept that this distinct pattern of
neural activation support inferences about the psychological aspects of other people, how
does it relate, or, can help us understand the phenomenon of animism?
Putting it very briefly my suggestion is the following: What it means in neurological
terms to apply ToM to the non-animate, is to process and interact with things using those
mechanisms and neural networks that we customarily use for interacting with people.
More simply it means that you expand the boundaries of social mind by incorporating
into the field of social cognition inanimate elements and things. This ‘hypertrophy of
social cognition’ (Boyer 2001), which may initially appear as a misapplication of ToM
capacities or a false attribution of agency, can be used, in the context of religious
experience as a powerful strategy of selective attention, memory and body schema
expansion. What is also important to mention in relation to our present discussion is that
ToM in addition to its traditional frontal lobe activations has been recently associated
with a different area, known as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) (Saxe and Kanwisher
2003; Saxe and Wexler 2005). This area, traditionally associated with a number of tasks
within the spectrum of human social cognition, such as human face identification tasks
and identification of biological motion, has also been very recently identified as a key
brain area behind various autoscopic phenomena that may also have played a crucial role
in the development of religious thinking (Blanke et al. 2004; Blanke and Arzy 2005).
Autoscopic phenomena (AP) constitute a well definedgroup of primarily visual
experiences during which the subject has the impression of seeing a second own body in
extrapersonal space. Three distinct forms of autoscopic phenomena have been defined
(Figure 26.2): (a) Autoscopy (AS), (b) Out-of-body experience (OBE), and (c)
Heautoscopy (HAS). Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are important for our current
discussion because they challenge the spatial unity of the isolated self as the subject of
experience. In particular, in autoscopic situations the self experiences itself ‘beyond the