Looping Between Anthropology, Phenomenology and Neuroscience: The case of speaking in tongues

What philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls “looping” is simple in principle but profound in practice: beliefs, expectations, and practices shape what people feel — and those feelings, rooted in part in the brain, reshape what people believe and do. In his new book Tongues of Fire: How Charismatic Prayer Changes Evangelical Brains and Inspires Spirit-Filled Activism, Josh Brahinsky draws on ethnography, phenomenology, and brain scans of people speaking in tongues, practiced in churches holding an estimated 500 million people worldwide. In worship, surrender to God, to preachers, to husbands forms a single system — culture invites the mouth releases into tongues, emotions open up, and the brain’s planning and self-monitoring quiet, each layer of release making the others more available. The more fully worshipers release, the more creative they become — and paradoxically, the more empowered and socially engaged they feel. And so the loop continues between the social and the neurobiological. Brahinsky argues that some questions about human experience require us to loop between the ethnographic and the experimental, the cultural and the neural. He proposes that looping is not only what happens inside charismatic evangelical communities — it is what has to happen between the disciplines we use to study them. Understanding how spiritual experience mobilizes social action among charismatic Christians may be precisely the kind of puzzle that requires us to look at both.

About the speaker | Josh Brahinsky

Josh Brahinsky is a psychological anthropologist at McGill’s Department of Transcultural Psychiatry and Stanford’s Religious Studies department. He combines ethnographic fieldwork, phenomenological interviews, and brain imaging to study prayer, speaking in tongues, meditation, and breathwork—examining how these practices cultivate surrender, how communities transmit them, and how they transform consciousness and behavior. His research appears in academic journals, podcasts, and his book Tongues of Fire: How Charismatic Prayer Changes Evangelical Brains and Inspires Spirit-Filled Activism.

No booking required. To be followed by drinks in the Staff Common Room, Dept of Anthropology.