Art as a Spiritual Technology: An Evolutionary, Anthropological and Neuroscientific Perspective

Annalisa Burello

Independent Scholar, London, UK

Annalisa Burello MSc is an independent scholar whose work explores the relation between art, spirituality, and embodied experience. She trained in economics at Bocconi University, in photography at the University of Westminster and in anthropology of religion at the London School of Economics and also holds a certification in Holistic Integrative Creative Arts Therapy. Her research focuses on art as a spiritual technology, with particular attention to ritual, affect, and contemporary forms of the sacred.

Art as a Spiritual Technology: An Evolutionary, Anthropological and Neuroscientific Perspective

Abstract

This article proposes that the arts function as a spiritual technology: a principal biocultural means through which spiritual states are produced and sustained. While Ellen Dissanayake’s artification hypothesis clarifies the role of the arts as embodied means of ritual participation and self-transcending experience, its implications for spirituality studies remain largely untapped. By synthesising Dissanayake’s ethological insights with Allan Schore’s interpersonal

neurobiology and recent neuroscientific research on entrainment, I argue that the arts are not merely symbolic adjuncts to religion, but the foundational

‘behavioural counterpart’ (Dissanayake 2008) through which spiritual life is enacted. This framework demonstrates that in many contexts belief is not the cause of ritual, but an effect of rhythmic, artistic rites. It also shows that affective regulation and self-transcendent experience are not opposing outcomes, but related phases of participatory spiritual process. The article therefore repositions the arts as central to the production of collective intensity, affective regulation, and embodied meaning-making, and argues for their more explicit integration into the study of spirituality.

Keywords: artification; evolution; ritualization; affect theory; evolutionary aesthetic; right hemisphere

Introduction: Re-centring the Arts in Spirituality Studies

In the study of religion and spirituality the arts have long been treated as secondary, either illustrative handmaidens to theology or aesthetic embellishments to the supposedly more important domain of belief. This article challenges that marginalization by bringing Ellen Dissanayake’s evolutionary account of ‘artification’ into closer dialogue with spirituality studies. While Dissanayake’s work has enriched fields from ethology to art therapy, I argue that it also offers underused resources for rethinking spirituality not primarily as a set of cognitive propositions, but as an embodied and bio-behavioural process.

My central claim is that the arts function as a spiritual technology: a skilled, repeatable, and culturally elaborated mode of technē that regulates affect, entrains attention, and fosters collective coherence. In the Aristotelian sense, technē refers to a practical and productive form of knowledge oriented toward bringing something into being1. By adopting this framework, I propose a shift in the study of spirituality away from epistēmē, understood here as the domain of doctrine, proposition, and formal belief, and toward the temporal arts as a specialised practice through which sacred experience is generated, intensified and sustained. Drawing on Dissanayake’s (2008) suggestion that ceremonial arts are the behavioural counterpart of religious beliefs, I argue that in many ritual contexts, belief is not the cause of participation, but one of its effects.

This article makes a theoretical contribution by bringing into relation four bodies of scholarship that are often treated separately: evolutionary theories of artification, the anthropology of ritual and material religion, affect theory and attachment-based neurobiology, and contemporary neuroscience, including second-person approaches (Schilbach et al. 2013) to synchrony and participation. Read together, these literatures suggest that the arts are not merely symbolic adjuncts to religion, but central mechanisms for organising affective attention, collective intensity, and embodied meaning-making.

This article develops a conceptual and interdisciplinary framework for understanding how spiritual efficacy is materially, affectively and biologically

‍ ‍1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.4, 1140a1–23.

mediated. This framework also provides a basis for future work on how the arts may function within contemporary non-doctrinal or spiritually non-religious forms of practice, however that broader sociological question lies beyond the scope of the present article. What this article establishes, instead, is that the arts must be moved from the margins to the centre of spirituality studies as one of the principal means through which spiritual states are enacted.

From early functionalist anthropologists to the material turn: Ritual as productive action

Early functionalist anthropology provides the empirical foundation for treating spirituality as a set of productive actions rather than a system of beliefs. Bronisław Malinowski (1922, 1925) and Émile Durkheim (1915) shifted the focus from the cognitive content of religion to its pragmatic outcomes. Malinowski demonstrated that ritual and magic are practical psychological responses to uncertainty. In his study of Trobriand Islander rituals, he observed that art was never an autonomous aesthetic pursuit; it was a functional necessity. He noted that a native canoe (waga) is far more than a ‘bit of shaped matter’; it is an ‘object of cult and admiration’ possessing its own ‘individuality’ (1922, 105).

Malinowski’s most significant contribution to this framework is his identification of magic as a tool to ‘ritualize man’s optimism’ (1925, 70). In this context, ritual is a biological stabilizer that channels high-stress anxiety into patterned, collective expression. Dissanayake (2008) builds on this by showing that the arts— specifically rhythmic movement, song, and visual marking—are the behavioural tools that make this stabilization effective. For example, the intricate carvings on a Trobriand canoe are not mere decorations; they are governed by a ‘social organisation of labour’ where the ‘expenditure of effort, skill, and valued materials’ signals the supreme importance of the artefact (Malinowski 1922, 56). This ‘making special’ is a deliberate technē that separates the sacred from the ordinary to ensure collective cooperation.

While Malinowski addressed individual psychology, Émile Durkheim (1915) identified the social mechanism of this spiritual technology. He challenged the ‘intellectualist’ view that religion is primarily a system of ideas. Instead, Durkheim argued that religion exists to make people act and to ‘help them live’ (417). He identified the ‘cult’—the repetitive, physical rite—as the efficacious mechanism that generates a sense of ‘increased force.’ Through collective, synchronized action— ’collective effervescence’—individuals undergo a physiological and emotional transformation.

Critically, Durkheim’s work supports the hierarchy of technē over epistēmē. He famously stated: ‘the cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically’ (1915, 417). In other words, ritual action produces the belief. However, Durkheim categorized drumming, dance, and masking as ‘superfluous works of luxury’ generated by ritual excitement (381). I contend that these artistic behaviors are not ‘surplus’; they are the actual technology—the specific triggers—that produce the state of effervescence. As Durkheim himself noted, for the believer, these states of ‘joy, peace, enthusiasm, and strength’ function as the ‘experimental proof’ of the ritual’s efficacy (417-418).

The ‘material turn’ in anthropology has corrected Durkheim's oversight. Scholars like Birgit Meyer (2012) and Matthew Engelke (2012) have critiqued the Protestant bias that privileges internal belief (epistēmē) over external sensory experience. Meyer demonstrates that humans ‘fabricate’ religious experience through sound, images, and ritual practices. These materials do not merely symbolize a divine presence; they are the tools used to ‘bring it into presence’ (2012, 20). Despite this corrective, the ‘material turn’ lacks a biological explanation. Meyer and Engelke establish that religious experience is materially mediated, but they do not explain the physiological ‘how.’ They observe that aesthetic forms produce effects, but they do not analyze the arts as spiritually operative practices governed by the biological laws of the human brain. To move from the observation that art works to an explanation of the biological mechanisms involved, we must bridge this anthropological foundation with the neurobiology of human attachment and entrainment.

The affective foundations of rituals: Affect Theory, Schore’s Attachment Theory, the right hemisphere

The transition from epistēmē to technē is supported by a significant shift away from the computational models of mind towards the centrality of emotion and affect. Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory (1962, 1963) established the foundational pillar for this turn, proposing that precognitive affective states shape perception, decision-making, and social interaction. When read alongside contemporary neurobiology, this implies that spirituality is not a secondary internal state but an embodied, relational, and contagious process.

A primary architect of this synthesis is Allan N. Schore, whose work integrates attachment theory, affective neuroscience, and interpersonal neurobiology to reveal how the human brain is shaped through emotional relationships. Schore identifies the construct of regulation as the fundamental organizing principle of the human mind (2017, 109). He introduced a psycho-neurobiological model of emotional development that laid the groundwork for interpersonal neurobiology. Central to this framework is the discovery that neural activity becomes aligned between individuals through nonverbal affective attunement—a process that begins in early mother-infant interaction but serves as the primordial template for all subsequent ritual behaviour (111). Building on this, Schore’s modern attachment theory conceptualizes right-brain to-right-brain socio-emotional communication as a critical driver of human development (111). The right hemisphere serves as the psychobiological substrate of the human unconscious and the primary site of emotion-processing beneath awareness. Citing Gainotti, Schore asserts that while the left hemisphere analyses states at a conceptual, verbal level, the right hemisphere processes ‘true emotions’ and establishes a self-system that generates a background state of well-being (112). In this framework, the unconscious is fundamentally relational, synthesizing Freud’s concept of the unconscious with the ethological foundations of John Bowlby’s attachment theory. By prioritizing nonverbal, right-hemispheric ones, researchers have gained a more nuanced understanding of preverbal infancy and its role in stress regulation (114). During these formative stages, mother and child engage in 'attunement' through nonverbal communication—touch, prosody, and rhythmic engagement —a right hemisphere-dominated interaction that shapes the infant’s stress regulation and attachment style. This process involves a physiological synchronization between their respective central and autonomic nervous systems, resulting in an empathic, bi directional co-regulation of affective states (116). This interactive regulation of attunement and reattunement restores autonomic balance and homeostasis, re establishing feelings of safety and trust (116).

An attuned mother appraises the nonverbal expressions of her infant’s internal arousal and affective states, regulates them, and communicates them back to her baby. Thus a mother’s responses are finely attuned to the moment-to-moment changes in her infant’s facial expression, vocalisation, and body movement. Her own state is in turn affected by changes in her infant’s state. (115)

Through this synchronisation, a responsive caregiver fosters secure attachment, reinforcing Bowlby’s (1969) and Ainsworth’s (1978) models of attachment. Conversely, disruptions in this process lead to maladaptive attachment patterns and a reduced capacity to tolerate social stress (127).

When under stress, such personalities avoid turning to others for interactive regulation. Instead, they disengage from the social environment and rapidly enter into a state of defensive dissociative autoregulation. The inability to cope with emotional and social stressors finds expression in a lowered threshold for emotional turbulence, an increased tendency for defensive dissociation that blunts both negative and positive affect, and a hyperreactivity to novel events (2017, 127).

Schore’s research also highlights the importance of play in structuring affect regulation. Play is recognised as a crucial mechanism for emotional development: ‘[p]lay calms and soothes infants, and it modulates their stressful states of negative arousal, replacing stress with intense joy and excitement’ (117). Notably, this process mirrors the dynamics of ritual and artistic performance.

In conclusion, a well-regulated adult, in times of stress, will instinctively seek social engagement for comfort and regulation (prosocial behaviours). In this way, the group assumes the maternal role in modulating and synchronising individual states of arousal. Schore’s modern attachment theory furthermore provides the blueprint of the physiological mechanism—the ‘how’—underlying Dissanayake’s artification and rituals hypotheses.

Art as exaptation: Dissanayake’s artification hypothesis and ritual efficacy

The evolutionary foundation of spiritual technology rests on a transition from treating art as an aesthetic object to recognizing it as a universal human behaviour. Ellen Dissanayake’s (1988) ethological approach identifies a biological common denominator (2017a, 144) for the arts across time and cultures, shifting the inquiry from what art means (the Western epistemological tradition) to what art does for human adaptation.

This framework overcomes several major epistemic and cultural obstacles that have historically marginalized the arts in spirituality studies. First, it rejects the chauvinism of Western aesthetics that reduces art to elite production, instead treating it as a species-wide trait (2008, 1). Second, it challenges the view of the arts as spandrels, or epiphenomena (see Gould & Lewontin 1979)—incidental by-products of language and cognition that serve no adaptive purpose (see Pinker 1997; Lewontin 1999 and 2001; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Dennett 2006). Dissanayake’s core contention is that artification—the deliberate ‘making special’ of ordinary reality—is a primary mechanism for survival rather than an evolutionary accident.

Where evolutionary explanations were offered, they typically relied on mechanisms of sexual selection and 'fitness signalling' (e.g. Miller 2000), or were framed through the competitive cost-benefit lenses of sociobiology (e.g., Williams 1966; Dawkins 1976). Dissanayake demonstrates that artistic behaviours evolved primarily to foster cooperation and social bonding. This article argues that her emphasis on these cooperative behaviours provides the necessary link between biology and ritual: the arts emerged as a critical social technology. By fostering prosocial alignment, the arts provided the behavioural tools required to manage collective stress and ensure group coherence in the primordial environment.

A decisive shift in this framework is the move from the artwork to the behaviour. Dissanayake (1988, 1992) identifies the universal common denominator of the arts not in particular objects or aesthetic canons, but in the activity of artification— the deliberate process of ‘making something special’ or ‘making the ordinary extraordinary’ (1992, 49; 2017b, 17). In this ethological model, music, body decoration, dance, drumming, and ritual elaboration are not separate modern genres, but manifestations of a single behavioural disposition to mark out and formalize specific experiences.

This adaptationist perspective seeks to identify the evolutionary function of such behaviour. Dissanayake proposed that the proto-aesthetic origin of the arts resides in the mother–infant bond (2017b, 18). Here art is framed as an exaptation—a process by which an evolutionary trait, initially developed for one purpose, is repurposed for a new function. Exaggerated vocalisation, rhythmic movement, stylised facial expression, repetition, and formalised gesture—known as ‘motherese’—in early caregiver–infant interaction provided the evolutionary template for later artistic and ritual behaviour. These affectively charged exchanges served a critical regulatory function, synchronizing the dyad and regulating the infant’s autonomic state. In this respect, the artification hypothesis anticipates Schore’s contemporary physiological work on attunement, specifically his account of right-hemisphere-dominated affective co regulation.

In this hypothesis, these proto-aesthetic/artistic behaviours were co-opted to address new adaptive challenges, such as fostering group cooperation and alleviating anxiety. The transition from mother-infant interaction to collective spirituality is mediated through the process of ritualization. Drawing on ethological foundations (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971; Morris 1957), Dissanayake identifies four core elements of this process: formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration. These elements, initially evolved to secure the dyadic bond, were evolutionarily extended to group ceremonies to reinforce social cohesion and collective emotional regulation.

While cultural variability is vast, ritual ceremonies function as behavioral manifestations of cognitive belief systems (Alcorta & Sosis 2005) through a specific set of operational characteristics. As Brown and Dissanayake (2009) demonstrate, these ceremonies are fundamentally multimodal and participative. They synchronize a group by combining singing, instrumentation, dance, and sensory intensification—decorating both the body and the environment to mark the occasion as ‘special’.

Crucially, the efficacy of this technology depends on active participation rather than passive observation. By engaging participants through coordinated clapping, movement, and vocalization, ritual produces meaning through shared action. This aligns with the West African aesthetic principle noted by John Chernoff (1979, 23): ‘without participation, there is no meaning’. In this framework, meaning is not an abstract concept to be understood (epistēmē), but a physiological and social state produced through the technē of rhythmic, collective performance.

Ritual as a collection of arts: The mechanics of efficacy

A central tenet of the artification hypothesis is that rituals are essentially ‘collections of arts’—interwoven systems of music, dance, poetry, and visual marking that are inseparable from the social cohesion they promote. Dissanayake (2017b, 22) argues that if these artifications were removed one by one, the ritual would dissolve into ‘everyday people using their voices and bodies in ordinary ways’. This suggests that artification does not merely accompany religious practice but is the very substance of the practice itself.

From a functional perspective, these ritualized behaviours serve to regulate stress, anxiety, and group dynamics. By co-opting the proto-aesthetic signals of the mother-infant bond, ancestral societies developed a mechanism to address two primary adaptive challenges: the relief of existential anxiety and the facilitation of group cooperation (23). This provides the biological ‘how’ for Malinowski’s (1954) observation that ritual arises in response to environmental uncertainty. The performance of ceremonies at transitional times—such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death—functions as a strategic intervention in the face of biological risk (van Gennep 1908; Turner 1969). Rather than being symbolic reflections of belief, these ceremonies are performed specifically to ‘influence important outcomes’ and ‘to have an effect’ (Malinowski 1954). In this framework, the specific technē of the arts—the rhythmic drumming, the synchronized dance, the formalization of speech—is the active ingredient that allows ritual to function as a survival technology. It provides a structured, biological response to the chaos of uncertainty, transforming paralyzing anxiety into coordinated, efficacious action.

The inversion of collective effervescence: Art as the driver of belief

Dissanayake’s framework provides a necessary correction to Durkheim’s concept of ‘collective effervescence.’ While Durkheim identified the heightened emotional state generated during collective ritual, he largely dismissed the arts as a ‘surplus’ byproduct of this excitement. Dissanayake (2017b) inverts this relationship, arguing that the arts are the primary mechanisms used to generate and sustain these states. In this view, if the specific artifications—the music, dance, and rhythmic elaboration—were removed, the collective effervescence would fail to materialize.

This perspective aligns with the ‘material turn’ in anthropology, specifically supporting Meyer’s (2012) concept of belief fabrication. Brown and Dissanayake (2009, 47) assert that artful behaviours are the ‘most important mechanisms’ linking ritual practice with cognitive belief systems. They argue that the technē of artification causes direct cognitive changes in the ‘signification and function’ of an event. As Dissanayake

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(2008) explains:

I view ceremonial arts as the behavioral counterpart of religious beliefs... [B]elief was an effect of rites. Beliefs and doctrines are like black and white outline drawings that require the color of emotion to become psychologically incorporated as a living, forceful presence. (22)

By engaging and shaping emotion, the arts transform abstract precepts into a ‘living, forceful presence.’ This suggests that religious practice appeals less to the intellect than to the senses. Deep states of awe, wonder, and emotional bonding are not produced by esoteric knowledge (epistēmē), but by the shared, stimulating activities of the rite. ‘Rituals work because their artifications provide the physical excitement and drama that make their messages memorable and meaningful’ (Dissanayake 2017b, 24; 1992). In this functionalist model, the arts are not ‘superfluous’ luxuries; they are the operative technology that fabricates the sacred.

The neurobiology of spiritual technology

The efficacy of spiritual technology is rooted in four distinct yet overlapping neuro physiological domains: neurochemistry, brain’s structural anatomy, neural oscillations, and the phenomenological evidence of embodied presence.

1. Neurochemistry and the endocrine system

Contemporary research confirms that participating in formalised, rhythmically repeated activities—the core of artification—actively regulates the human stress response and social bonding circuitry. Dissanayake (2017) integrates in her theory key findings in modern neuroscience such as the role of oxytocin and other endorphins in emotional bonding and stress regulation. Carter et al. (1999)’s study establishes that this neuropeptide is a primary mediator of social attachment, actively down-regulating

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amygdala activity to reduce the social anxiety or ‘neophobia’ that typically prevents deep connection between non-kin. Complementing this, Üvnas-Moberg (1999) identifies a specific ‘calm and connection’ system triggered by social contact. Her research shows that the release of oxytocin induces physiological states that are the inverse of the stress response, lowering blood pressure and cortisol levels while raising pain thresholds. In a ritual context, this hormonal shift enables the ‘collective effervescence’ required for community resilience, providing a neurochemical reward for shared presence.

But only recently have researchers discovered that the same neurotransmitters —oxytocin and opioids—released during parturition and maternal behaviours, are also released during dancing, listening to music and moving with one or more people (Freeman 2000 in Dissanayake 2017). The work of Robin Dunbar and Bronwyn Tarr (2014) focuses on the ‘social high’ produced by the temporal arts of music and dance. They argue that the physical exertion involved in rhythmic, coordinated movement triggers the release of endogenous opioids (endorphins). Their studies show that when people dance or drum in synchrony, their pain thresholds increase significantly compared to when they perform the same movements alone. This ‘opioid flood’ is the mechanism that facilitates what they call ‘self-other merging’, providing a neurochemical foundation for the ‘communitas’ described by Victor Turner (1969). These substances hence are not merely agents of pleasure; they are the biochemical triggers for prosocial commitment and group trust. By providing a neurochemical reward for social cohesion, these mechanisms bridge the biological triggers of early mother–infant bonding with the collective experience of the group.

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2. Structural anatomy: Role of the temporal and parietal lobes and the frontal cortex in rituals and spiritual experiences

Beyond the general dominance of the right hemisphere implicated in Schore’s and Dissanayake’s theories, studies surveyed by Jeeves and Brown (2009) point to the involvement of specific brain regions in reported spiritual experiences. V.S. Ramachandran’s ‘God module’ hypothesis (1997) claims that within the temporal lobes there exists a ‘unique brain structure’ dedicated to the ‘unique and intrinsic class’ of religious experiences where heightened activity—often observed in temporal-lobe epilepsy (TLE)—can produce intense feelings of religious significance and ecstasy (Jeeves and Brown 2009, 97-98). Similarly, Persinger (1987) links temporal-lobe activation to the phenomenon of ‘sensed presence’ in which an individual feels a presence even when not visible (Jeeves and Brown 2009, 98-99).

Conversely, the model developed by Newberg and d’Aquili (2001) regarding the parietal lobes proposes that during deep meditation or preyer, a decrease in activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, or the ‘orienting association area’ (OAA), results in the loss of the ability to distinguish between the self and the external world. This structural ‘deafferentation’ leads to the experience of ‘Absolute Unitary Being’ (Jeeves and Brown 2009, 99).

Beyond the spatial and affective shifts of the parietal and temporal regions, the frontal lobe serves as the cognitive gatekeeper of the ecstatic state. Achieving high arousal transcendence through the temporal arts involves a transition from intense concentration to what is termed ‘transient hypofrontality’ (Dietrich 2003). While the prefrontal cortex initially provides the ‘top-down’ focus required to engage in ritual, the sensory overstimulation of rhythmic chanting or movement eventually induces a down regulation of this area. By suspending the executive functions of critical judgment, self monitoring, and the medial prefrontal cortex’s (mPFC) role in social self-representation,

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the practitioner achieves a state of cognitive surrender. This silencing of the egoic ‘internal critic’ allows for a loss of the sense of time and a bypass of analytical filters, physically enabling the unmediated, ecstatic resonance that defines participatory spirituality. Together, these models help explain how the temporal arts may support not only affective bonding and physiological regulation, but also altered states of perception in which the boundaries of the self are loosened.

3. Neural oscillations and wave synchrony: Neural coupling and hyperscanning in performance

Recent EEG and fMRI studies have identified the specific ‘wavelength’ of spiritual connection. Research presented by Lisa Miller in her book The Awakened Brain (2021) indicates that when individuals are emotionally and spiritually in sync, their brains demonstrate significant entrainment in the alpha-wave band (8–12 Hz)—entrainment is the term for when two oscillations become synchronized (198). This wavelength is often described as the ‘bridge’ between the conscious and the non-conscious states; in a ritual context, alpha synchronization appears to be the mechanism through which individuals ride toward a state of ‘unified awareness’ or ‘awakened connection’. This synchrony is particularly concentrated in the parietal region, a posterior brain area associated with our sense of orientation in space and our boundary between self and other (198-199). Additionally, rhythmic stimulation induces gamma-wave activity, associated with heightened emotional integration, while driving the thalamocortical system toward high-voltage slow-wave activity (delta and theta bands) characteristic of deep meditative states (Newberg 2010; Yaden 2017). By utilising external temporal anchors, artistic rituals entrain multiple brains into a single, resonant functional unit.

Newberg (2018) found that the strength of entrainment increases with the number of participants in a transcendent state added in the room. In this sense, the

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religious or ritual assembly (such as the Jewish minyan) functions as a biological amplifier: the more participants are entrained in this alpha-state, the more rapidly a newcomer is brought into the same regulated, spiritual state (Miller 2021, 198).

Furthermore, the ‘contagion’ of ritual state mentioned by earlier theorists now has a specific neural substrate. Using hyperscanning techniques, researchers like Pavel Goldstein have explored brain-to-brain coupling—or resonance—as a mechanism for collective healing. When people engage in mutual empathic exchange or ritualized comfort, they activate a shared neural network involving the bilateral anterior insula and the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. These regions are the seats of shared affect; their activation suggests that ritual does not merely represent empathy but physically blurs the boundaries between participants. This ‘interbrain circuitry’ allows for a physiological ‘oneness’ where the stress-regulation of the group can alleviate the pain or anxiety of the individual (199).

Recent breakthroughs in ‘second-person’ neurobiology and hyperscanning—the simultaneous recording of multiple brains—help to specify the physiological mechanisms that earlier anthropology could only infer (Schilbach et al. 2013). Research on interpersonal synchrony demonstrates that coordinated activity aligns participants at behavioural, affective, physiological, and neural levels (Hoehl, Fairhurst, and Schirmer 2021; Konrad et al. 2024). In musical and ritual performance, this results in inter-brain synchrony, recruiting neural alignment linked to timing, shared attention, and cooperative coordination (Cheng et al. 2024). This process involves the alignment of cortical oscillations, particularly in the delta and theta bands associated with social cognition, which facilitates a state of ‘neural coupling’ and self-other merging (Tarr, Launay, and Dunbar 2014).

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These artistic technologies utilize external temporal anchors to ‘lock’ the biological rhythms of multiple individuals into a shared state. Studies of collective singing, for instance, demonstrate measurable synchronization of respiration and cardiac activity, with coordination significantly enhanced during tightly structured performance compared to rest (Müller and Lindenberger 2011; Lange et al. 2022). Comparable effects have also been documented in explicitly ritual contexts: Konvalinka et al. (2011), for instance, found synchronised arousal between fire-walkers and related spectators during a Spanish fire-walking ritual, suggesting that collective rites can align physiological states even across participants and observers. Taken together, these findings suggest that rhythmic, repeated, multimodal artistic practices can entrain bodies, attention, and expectation in real time. Furthermore, rhythmic stimulation acts upon the thalamocortical system, driving the brain toward states of high-voltage slow wave activity that are neurochemically associated with deep meditative or ‘transcendent’ states (Will and Turow 2011). Taken together, these findings suggest that rhythmic, repeated, multimodal artistic practices can entrain bodies, attention, and expectation in real time. Although the neuroscience of ritual remains less developed than that of music, the implication is clear: where rituals recruit synchronized movement, vocalization, and shared sensory focus, they mobilize these neurophysiological mechanisms to effectively ‘tune’ a group into a single, resonant functional unit (Xygalatas et al. 2011).

4. Phenomenological experience: Sensed presence and dissolution

The neurobiological mechanisms find robust empirical corroboration in the lived experiences of practitioners across the ‘temporal arts’. While Schore provides the developmental blueprint and Dissanayake the evolutionary framework, the reports of singers, dancers, and performers suggest that these activities function as intentional

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technologies for accessing what Jorge N. Ferrer (2007) terms ‘participatory spirituality’. Ferrer’s participatory turn in Transpersonal Psychology provides a useful conceptual bridge for these findings. Against models of spirituality centred on private inner transcendence, Ferrer argues that spiritual life emerges through cocreative participation involving body, affect, relation, and world rather than disembodied consciousness alone (Ferrer 2008, 2011). In this perspective, spirituality is not merely an inward state to be represented or interpreted, but an enacted and embodied event. This account resonates strongly with the present argument: the temporal arts do not simply express prior spiritual meanings, but help bring them into being through participatory, affective, and relational practice.

In this mode, the ritual act is not a representation of the sacred but a direct participation in it. Qualitative research into the performing arts identifies a high frequency of ‘anomalous’ or transcendent experiences that mirror the neurobiological dissolution of the self. In her transdisciplinary study of performing artists, Roff (2013) documents numerous anecdotal accounts of performers experiencing altered states of consciousness, including a ‘terrifying loss of focus’ that paradoxically transforms into a sense of ‘lightness’ and levitation during peak performances. These reports of feeling ‘taken away from [the self]’ and transported to a collective state correspond to the temporal-limbic activation of a ‘sensed presence’ and the parietal deactivation of self boundaries. Singers report a ‘dissolution of the self’ and a heightened sense of inter subjective resonance, mirroring the cardiac and respiratory coupling observed in choral studies (Freinkel 2015). This ‘self-other merging’ is a hallmark of the right hemisphere’s relational capacity, providing a bridge between individual affect regulation and collective spiritual coherence. Judith Becker’s work on ‘deep listeners’ and trancing similarly suggests that musical participation can cultivate culturally

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patterned forms of affective absorption, in which listening itself becomes a bodily pathway to altered states (Becker 2004). This further supports the view that the temporal arts do not merely represent spiritual realities but help to induce them through rhythm, attention, and emotional entrainment.

Similarly, Kieft (2014) explores how rhythmic, improvised movement in ‘Movement Medicine’ facilitates a direct interaction with the sacred, where the dance becomes a ‘prayer’ and a ‘map’ for accessing gateways to the soul. Furthermore, Domene and Jackson de Domene (2023) highlight how the interpersonal synchrony of social dance leads to a ‘cognitive embrace’ and collective flourishing, physically enacting the ‘right-brain-to-right-brain’ attunement essential for participatory spirituality. Together with Brandon Thompson’s (2020) research on ecstatic poetry, these studies confirm that artistic practices are not merely aesthetic, but function as primary technologies for inducing transformative mystical states.

These reports align with the findings of brain-to-brain resonance and the activation of the bilateral anterior insula, where the physiological state of one person is literally mirrored in another (Miller 2021). As Dissanayake (2009) argues, these ‘temporal arts’ are not merely aesthetic choices but are essential biological tools for ’making special’—ritualizing human interactions to reduce the neurochemical markers of stress and replace them with the ‘social high’ of endorphin-led bonding. Thus, the spiritual efficacy of art lies in its ability to physically enact the ‘right-brain-to right-brain’ attunement that Schore identifies as the foundation of human psychological health.

Conclusions

This article makes a theoretical intervention in spirituality studies by arguing that the

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arts should be understood not as ornamental supplements to religion, but as one of the principal biocultural means through which spiritual states are generated, shared, and sustained. By bringing Dissanayake’s theory of artification into dialogue with functionalist anthropology, material religion, affect theory, attachment-based neurobiology, and contemporary neuroscience, I have proposed that rhythmic, multimodal, participatory arts function as a spiritual technology: a repeatable and embodied technē for regulating affect, entraining attention, and organising collective intensity. From this perspective, ritual efficacy lies not primarily in doctrine or belief, but in patterned participation. Belief is often consolidated after the fact, once bodies have already been drawn into synchrony, heightened feeling, and shared experience.

This framework also clarifies the relation between regulation and transcendence. The arts do not produce ecstatic states by bypassing the body’s need for safety, attunement, and affective organisation; rather, these are often the conditions through which self-transcendent experience becomes possible. In this sense, affective regulation and collective ecstasy are not competing outcomes but related phases of the same participatory process. Rhythmic, artistic rites can first stabilise and align bodies, emotions, and attention, and, under intensified conditions, carry individuals and groups into states of awe, dissolution, presence, and self-other merging.

The implications for spirituality studies are significant. If the arts can generate, amplify, and stabilise spiritual states through embodied participation, then they cannot remain marginal to the field. Their epistemic status must change. The arts are not merely symbolic expressions of meanings generated elsewhere; they are among the principal means by which spiritual experience is brought into being. For this reason, the arts deserve to be treated as a distinct and serious domain within spirituality studies, with

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implications not only for the study of religion, but also for future inquiry into non doctrinal, post-religious, and secular forms of spiritual practice.

Acknowledgements

ChatGPT Plus was used in a limited editorial capacity to assist with language refinement, reduction of word count, checking consistency in bibliography and references, identifying duplication, and improving the clarity and organisation of the manuscript. All interpretive claims, argumentation, source selection, and final wording were reviewed and approved by the author.

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