Behav Brain Sci
January 1, 2018
Rachel E. Watson-Jones, Cristine H. Legare
7 citations
Cultural evolutionary explanations of shamanism need to account for both its widespread recurrence and its variation across cultures. The authors argue that Singh's account of shamanism would be improved by focusing on the social functions shamanism serves within groups. Specifically, shamanism enhances social group cohesion, which sets it apart from other magico-religious practices.
Behav Brain Sci
January 1, 2018
Connor P. Wood, Kate J. Stockly
5 citations
Shamanistic trance forms vary systematically with cultural conditions. Possession trance, where a spirit takes over the body, is more often experienced by women and appears in more complex societies, whereas non-possession trance is not. The author argues that understanding these differences is essential for explaining how shamanism becomes professionalized and spreads across cultures.
Behav Brain Sci
June 25, 2026
Fleming and Michel's hypothesis about the origins of consciousness faces multiple challenges and overlooks phenomenal experience itself. While broadly agreeing with the authors' perspective, the commentators highlight these challenges and suggest that consciousness evolved to attribute subjective value, enabling organisms to care about and act upon what they sense.
Behav Brain Sci
June 25, 2026
The authors argue that the temporal profile of consciousness—the timing of conscious experience—is an underused constraint for evaluating theories of consciousness. They propose that the exact timing matters for the evolutionary hypothesis, and they present a rival hypothesis: in aquatic environments, consciousness already functioned to represent distal objects, with a time delay to consciousness in the 100–200 millisecond range.
Behav Brain Sci
June 25, 2026
The speed of conscious processing is sometimes taken to imply that consciousness plays no causal role in behavior. This paper argues that the claim that consciousness is slow, together with the idea that it constructs a predictive model of the world, actually supports a view of agency where people are consciously engaged with the world as it unfolds, both in perception and in response.