History
Belief has been engineered for as long as there have been people, and the record of it is scattered across archaeology, medicine, advertising and the files of intelligence services. Here it runs in one column, oldest first: 76 dated events, each rated for how well its evidence stands up, alongside the 184 books and papers that wrote the practice down.
Pick a mechanism to walk it from its earliest instance to now. The map follows the reading and lights the place each entry happened.
A pistonaut ran the machinery on other people rather than only describing it. The operator’s index →
to 3400 BC
Burial, pigment and monument. Practice with no surviving account of itself.
A young adult and a child were laid in prepared graves at Qafzeh with red ochre and a pair of deer antlers placed on the chest. Somebody spent labour and material on a person who could no longer use either, which is the earliest surviving evidence of a practice performed for the living about the dead.[1]
The Chauvet panels sit hundreds of metres inside the cave, past crawls and drops, in chambers reached in the dark with a lamp. The difficulty of arrival is part of what the images cost to see, and a staged approach to an image is one of the oldest instruments on this page.[2]
Two children at Sungir were buried head to head under roughly ten thousand mammoth-ivory beads, with spears of straightened tusk beside them. Each bead took the better part of an hour to make, so the burial represents months of a community's labour spent on a ceremony.[3]
People without agriculture quarried, carved and raised T-shaped limestone pillars into enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, used them, and then deliberately filled them in. Coordinated construction on that scale needs a reason that holds a large group together for years, and it stands at Göbekli Tepe before domesticated grain does.[4]
3400 BC to 300 BC
Writing arrives as administration, and a priestly office becomes a job with training and succession.
The earliest tablets from Uruk record grain, livestock and labour owed to and paid by the temple. Writing enters history as an instrument of an institution, and the literary uses arrive centuries after the ledgers.[5]
Sumerian temple records name priestly offices with rations, succession and training attached to them. The practice had a profession, a payroll and an apprenticeship for three thousand years before anyone attempted a theory of what it did.[6]
The ritual competence visible in Palaeolithic burial and the ritual competence administered by Sumerian temples are separated by tens of thousands of years that left no record of who taught whom. Treating them as one tradition follows from the practice surviving rather than from any document, and this is the single place on the page where the chain carries the weight.[6]
Sargon of Akkad placed Enheduanna in the highest priestly office of the moon god at Ur, and the temple hymns she composed carry her name. She is the first author in recorded history to sign a text, and the office she signed from was an appointment.[7]
Akkad took the southern priesthoods rather than suppressing them, and Assyriology treats such appointments as a standard Sargonid instrument for holding conquered cities. A ruler who holds the temple holds what the city already believes, which is cheaper than holding the city.[7]
An entire book of the Rigveda addresses soma, a plant pressed and drunk during sacrifice, and describes what drinking it does. A pharmacological agent is built into the ceremony from the earliest layer of the text.[8]
Wasson argued for the fly agaric, others for ephedra, syrian rue, or a preparation lost with the practice. Two centuries of argument have not settled which plant it was, and no candidate accounts for every verse.[8]
The Art of War puts deception first among the operations of war: appear unable when able, appear distant when near. The target named throughout is the opposing commander's picture of the field rather than his army, and the text reached its present shape by the fourth century BC under an authorship that has never been settled.[9]
The Analects treat li, correct ritual performance, as the instrument that makes a person rather than as an ornament on one already made. Bowing, mourning and the order of a banquet are drilled until they run without thought, and any theory of why that makes a person arrives long afterwards.[10]
Gorgias argues that oratory produces conviction without knowledge, standing to justice as cookery stands to medicine. The oldest surviving attack on rhetoric concedes the thing that matters, which is that it works.[11]
Rhetoric sorts the available means of persuasion into character, feeling and argument, and treats each as a competence a speaker can be trained in. Persuasion stops being a talent and becomes a subject with parts.[12]
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle, Poetics
The Organon establishes that an inference can be valid while its premises are false, so a sound-looking chain can carry a reader from a wrong start to a wrong finish without a visible break. Every later demonstration that a chain of reasoning can compel assent without being right runs on that separation.[13]
300 BC to 1400
Formation is written down as a curriculum, and rhetoric becomes a subject anyone can be taught.
De Oratore reports how a working advocate handles memory, delivery and the order he puts a case in, from a man who had won with all three in the courts. The handbook tradition that runs to the modern sales manual starts in a Roman practitioner's notes.[14]
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Epictetus held that assent is the one thing wholly within a person's power, and trained students to catch an impression before granting it. A student took the lessons down, which is why a curriculum aimed at the instant before belief forms survives at all.[15]
The same handful of exercises comes back year after year in the Meditations, written in camp on the Danube between campaigns, with no audience and no argument aimed at anyone else. An emperor running the curriculum on himself is the clearest case on the page of formation practised without any operation on another person.[16]
Patanjali, Yoga Sutras
The Praktikos lists eight recurring thoughts, from gluttony to pride, and prescribes a specific counter-practice for each. The desert produced a fault catalogue with remedies, which is a debugging manual by any later name.[17]
The Visuddhimagga sets out forty meditation objects, matches them to temperaments, and describes the states each produces in sequence. It is a staged curriculum with predicted results, written twelve centuries before anyone measured one.[18]
John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
The psychology of the Shifa divides the internal senses, giving the faculty that forms an image and the faculty that passes judgement on it different work. Later accounts of where a suggestion enters use that division, whether or not they credit it.[19]
Kakuan, The Ten Oxherding Pictures
The Eight Chapters treat character as a set of dispositions correctable by overshooting: a miser trains by handing out money past the point of comfort until the trait itself moves to the middle. Traits are handled as adjustable by repetition rather than as fixed by nature or fixed by insight.[20]
1400 to 1750
Copies get cheap. A dispute can reach a country in a month, and somebody notices and writes for it.
Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince
The ninety-five theses were printed at Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel within weeks and Luther then wrote deliberately in short vernacular pamphlets for the same machinery. A local academic quarrel became a continental event because somebody understood how cheap copies travel.[21]
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
The Prince holds that a ruler must seem merciful, faithful and religious, and need not be any of the three. Written in 1513 and printed after his death, it is the first European handbook to make that separation a matter of method rather than of vice.[22]
The Spiritual Exercises prescribe a thirty-day retreat with a daily examen, scheduled imaginative scenes, controlled diet and light, and rules for telling one inner movement from another. Ignatius wrote the instructions for the director as well as the exercitant, which makes it an installation procedure with quality control.[23]
De Vinculis in Genere describes the operator's work as fastening the target's imagination and appetite, and holds that the strongest bond is the one the target experiences as his own desire. It reads as a manipulation manual four centuries before the industry that needed one.[24]
The Tractatus asks who wrote a text, when, and to what end, in place of asking what it discloses. Sacred narrative becomes an object with authors and purposes, which is the move every later analysis of a founding story repeats.[25]
Mesillat Yesharim arranges the virtues in a fixed sequence where each rung is a precondition for the next, and refuses to let a student skip. Sequence is the claim: the same content in a different order does not install.[26]
1750 to 1900
The effect is separated from the theory that claimed it, put in a consulting room, and measured for the first time.
Mesmer treated patients in groups around a tub of magnetised water, with iron rods, low light, music and a robed operator, and produced convulsive crises to order. The whole setting was engineered years before anyone could say what in it was doing the work.[27]
Commissioners including Franklin, Lavoisier and Guillotin ran blinded tests: subjects convulsed at trees they had been told were magnetised and stayed calm at trees that had been magnetised without their knowledge. The effect was real, the proposed cause was not, and the report is the first controlled demonstration that belief was the active agent.[28]
Chladni bowed the edge of a sand-covered plate and the sand gathered along the lines that were standing still. A sound acquired a picture, and every later argument that vibration organises matter cites the figures.[29]
Franklin worked thirteen virtues one week at a time in rotation, marking each failure as a dot on a ruled chart and repeating the cycle four times a year. Self-formation acquires a schedule, a metric and a record, which is the shape every habit system since has kept.[30]
David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
Braid sat patients staring at a cork held above the eyes until the lids closed, and argued the effect came from their own fixed attention rather than from any fluid passing out of him. Relocating the mechanism into the person receiving it is what let the effect survive the collapse of the theory that produced it.[31]
Helena Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
Renan called a nation a daily plebiscite, and said a Frenchman has to have forgotten Saint Bartholomew's Day to be one. Membership is presented as something continuously performed, which puts a political identity in the same category as a belief that has to be kept installed.[32]
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Liébeault treated peasants in Nancy for nothing and Bernheim carried the method into a teaching hospital. Both held that the effects were suggestion working on an ordinary mind, against Charcot's position that they marked a diseased nervous system. Nancy won. Suggestion entered general medicine as a lever that works on an ordinary patient in an ordinary room.[33]
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine
James treated the sense that a thing is real as something that fastens onto whatever holds attention long enough, rather than as a verdict handed down after weighing evidence. Belief is described as a state with a cause, which is what every engineer on this page assumes.[34]
Le Bon argued that an assembled crowd suspends individual judgement and becomes suggestible as a single body. The book sold as sociology and was used as instruction: Mussolini cited it approvingly and the propaganda offices of the following decades worked from its picture of an audience.[35]
1900 to 1970
States, agencies and agencies of the other kind run the mechanism at scale, and most of the vocabulary in use today is set here.
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, A General Theory of Magic
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica
The Elementary Forms puts the generating mechanism of religion in gathered bodies rather than in doctrine: the heat a group produces in itself gets read by its members as contact with something outside them. The meeting is the machine, and the theology is the receipt.[36]
Spare condensed a stated desire into a single drawn sigil, then worked to forget what the sigil meant so the wish could act without conscious supervision. A private method for writing past the critical faculty, arrived at independently of any clinic.[37]
Aleister Crowley, Book 4
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Eight days after the United States declared war, Wilson created a committee on public information. It placed films, posters, cartoons and press copy, and fielded seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men to speak in cinemas. The staff were admen. A state had assembled a national persuasion machine, and several of the men who ran it went back to selling soap and cars when it closed.[38]
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Lippmann argued that people act on an internal picture of the world rather than on the world itself. Somebody supplies that picture, and supplying it is a job with a salary and an office. The picture is what acts. He set out the working conditions of an industry a year before Bernays wrote its first manual.[39]
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning
Pavlov demonstrated that a reliable physiological response could be transferred to a neutral cue, then extinguished, then restored, and that the schedule of reinforcement governs the whole thing. Belief was never his subject, and every later engineer borrowed his apparatus.[40]
Propaganda opens by calling the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the public's habits an organised element of democratic society, and names the invisible government that performs it. He is describing his own trade in the present tense, with clients waiting.[41]
Hired by American Tobacco to break the taboo on women smoking in public, Bernays paid debutantes to light Lucky Strikes during the New York Easter parade and briefed the press in advance to describe them as torches of freedom. A cigarette was fastened to the suffrage feeling and photographed in the act.[42]
C. K. Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions
The Reich ministry created in March 1933 put newspapers, broadcasting, cinema, theatre and public ceremony under a single administration, and rebuilt the annual calendar around party occasions. Every channel a citizen encountered was scheduled from one desk, which is the largest instance of the operation on the page.[43]
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
How to Win Friends turns liking into a set of executable steps: use the name, ask about the other man's hobby, let him get to the answer himself. Trust is treated as a component with an assembly instruction, and fifteen million copies later it still is.[44]
Yehuda Ashlag, Talmud Eser HaSefirot
Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology
Hofmann synthesised LSD-25 in 1938, shelved it, and on 19 April 1943 swallowed 250 micrograms on purpose and cycled home under its effects. The compound's discoverer used himself as the first subject, and spent the next fifty years arguing about the conditions under which anyone else should.[45]
At a Connecticut workshop in 1946 Lewin's researchers reviewed participants in the evening, some participants asked to sit in, and hearing themselves discussed changed the group more than the training had. The National Training Laboratories opened the following year to produce the effect deliberately, and the encounter group descends from it.[46]
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Moreno had a group member take the part of the person a patient could not face, and worked the scene in front of everyone else. The representative who stands for an absent relative in a family constellation is that chair, ninety years old.[47]
Linebarger wrote the American field manual for the trade under his own name while writing science fiction under another, setting out leaflet, broadcast and rumour as operations with doctrine. Psychological warfare acquires a curriculum, a doctrine and a course number inside a military.[48]
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous
Asch had confederates call a plainly shorter line longer, and subjects went along on about a third of the critical trials, with three quarters conforming at least once. The size of the effect is modest and the finding is that a unanimous room bends perception at all.[49]
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Dulles approved the programme in April 1953 with Sidney Gottlieb running it across universities, hospitals and safe houses, covering drugs, hypnosis, isolation and sensory deprivation. Most of the files were destroyed on order in 1973, so what is known comes from an accounting error that left one box of records behind.[50]
B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior
Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality
Franz Bardon, Initiation into Hermetics
Wasson sat through a velada led by María Sabina at Huautla in 1955 and gave the account to Life magazine in 1957 with her face in it. A closed practice became a destination, Sabina's house was burned, and she said afterwards that the mushrooms had lost their force.[54]
Biderman reduced what was done to American aircrew in Korea to eight methods, among them isolation, monopolised perception and trivial demands enforced to the letter, and printed them as a chart. The chart was written as a warning and has been read ever since as a checklist.[52]
Sargant placed religious conversion, political confession and battlefield collapse in a single mechanism: sustained stress overloads the nervous system, existing conditioning gives way, and whatever is presented next takes hold. He had run the treatments, which is why the book reads as reportage rather than as theory.[51]
Tomatis reported to the Académie des Sciences that a voice cannot produce a frequency the ear does not receive, then filtered what patients heard in order to change how they spoke. Sound became a treatment administered to a person rather than a subject studied at a distance.[53]
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders
Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
From 1961 Leary and his group gave psilocybin to inmates at Concord in a programme designed to reduce reoffending, with the researchers taking the drug alongside the subjects. Nothing else on the page shows so plainly how a study differs from an operation.[56]
Lifton sat in Hong Kong with people who had just come out of Chinese reform programmes and set out eight conditions, from milieu control to the demand for confession and the claim to decide who exists. It is the first instrument for recognising the operation from outside while it runs.[55]
Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question”
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
Pahnke gave psilocybin or an active placebo to divinity students in Marsh Chapel on Good Friday under double-blind conditions, and most of those who received the drug reported experiences meeting the standard descriptions of mysticism. A state a tradition had treated as granted was produced by dosing.[57]
Austin separated sentences that report a state of affairs from sentences that create one. A vow, a verdict and a christening change the world by being said, provided the conditions around them hold. The conditions do the work. A belief therefore needs a setting around it as much as it needs a proposition inside it.[58]
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The CIA's 1963 manual treats a cell with no clock, no window and no fixed mealtime as the instrument itself. Removing the ordinary markers of a day is described as the way to push a prisoner backward into dependence. It reads like a procedures handbook. What it is engineering is another person's grip on what is real.[59]
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Satir placed family members in physical postures and distances that matched the structure they were living in, so an arrangement nobody would state could be seen and altered. The family became a diagram made of its own bodies.[60]
Dave Elman, Hypnotherapy
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience
Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Seligman and Maier gave dogs shocks they could not escape, and the animals stopped attempting escape once it became available. The finding named a mechanism for why people stay in situations they could leave, and thirty-five years later it was read by the men who designed an interrogation programme.[61]
Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration
David Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account
John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
Charles Tart (ed.), Altered States of Consciousness
John Searle, Speech Acts
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
1970 onward
Delivery becomes continuous and personal, and the measuring instruments finally reach the brain doing the believing.
The Controlled Substances Act put LSD and psilocybin in Schedule I in 1970 and licensed human research stopped for two decades. The knowledge stayed intact and the practice went out of use, which is the cleanest case on the page of a technique closed by law rather than by evidence.[62]
est opened in San Francisco in 1971 with two long weekends, controlled breaks, sustained confrontation from the trainer and a vocabulary participants took home. Group method left the clinic and the seminar room and became a consumer purchase with a price list.[63]
Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
Virginia Satir, Peoplemaking
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark, Invisible Loyalties
Lefebvre defected in 1974 carrying a formal apparatus for inducing an adversary to choose against himself by shaping the options he believes are open. Deception acquires variables, and the operator's move becomes calculable rather than intuitive.[64]
Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch, Change
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore
John C. Lilly, Simulations of God
Martin Seligman, Helplessness
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, The Structure of Magic
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious
Jaynes argued that people before roughly 1200 BC experienced their own thoughts as commanding voices, and that introspective consciousness is a late cultural invention rather than a biological given. Classicists and psychologists largely reject it, no result has closed it, and it keeps producing work in both directions.[65]
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
A Pattern Language sets out two hundred and fifty-three patterns, among them light on two sides of every room and a place to sit near a front door. Each names a situation that keeps recurring and the arrangement that settles it, written plainly enough for the people who will live in the building. A design theory was released as an instrument rather than as an argument.[66]
Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World
Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice
R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self
Sidney Rosen (ed.), My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance
Israel Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic
Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson, Genograms in Family Assessment
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Barbara Krasner, Between Give and Take
Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut
Bernard Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
Michael Kerr and Murray Bowen, Family Evaluation
Steven Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control
John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links”
Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind
Strassman obtained the approvals in 1990 and began injecting DMT into volunteers at the University of New Mexico, the first licensed study of its kind in the country for twenty years. Getting the permissions took longer than running the study.[67]
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States
Alfred Tomatis, The Conscious Ear
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind
Brian Copenhaver (trans.), Hermetica
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error
Laurence Iannaccone, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong,” American Journal of Sociology
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel
Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads
Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism
Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
Hellinger built a method in which people who have never met a client's relatives stand in for them in a room and report what they feel from the position they are placed in. The staging is elaborate, the reports are consistent enough to work with, and what produces them is where the argument sits.[68]
Leary reported that psilocybin sessions had cut reoffending among the Concord inmates. Doblin's long follow-up found the comparison had used a mismatched base rate and that the real recidivism figure was no better than the norm, and the original claim still circulates.[56]
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis
Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, The Ancestor Syndrome
Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel
Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
Bert Hellinger, Acknowledging What Is
Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, the Emory “Do You Know?” studies on family narrative and resilience
International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome,” Nature
J. Craig Venter et al., “The Sequence of the Human Genome,” Science
Mitchell and Jessen took the training that teaches American aircrew to hold out under interrogation and inverted it. They sold the result to the CIA as an interrogation programme, and their company was paid eighty-one million dollars. A method built to inoculate people against coercion was run as the coercion.[69]
Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind
Thomas Metzinger, Being No One
Giulio Tononi, “An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness,” BMC Neuroscience
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe
Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music
Roland Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences,” Psychopharmacology
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained
Henry Stapp, Mindful Universe
Benny Shanon, “Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis,” Time and Mind
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, Words Can Change Your Brain
Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul
Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death
Joel David Bakst, The Jerusalem Stone of Consciousness: DMT, Kabbalah and the Pineal Gland
Kim TallBear, Native American DNA
Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is – And Is Not
Michael Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain
Robin Carhart-Harris et al., “The Entropic Brain,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the Orch OR Theory,” Physics of Life Reviews
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success
Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA
Andrew Newberg, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain
Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty
Bannon described the strategy as flooding the zone, on the stated premise that the real opposition is the media and the way to beat it is to fill it. The target is attention itself rather than any particular belief, which is a change of aim rather than of method.[70]
Andrew Newberg, Neurotheology
David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here
Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World
Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality
Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston, “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain,” Pharmacological Reviews 71
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Andrew Newberg, Sex, God, and the Brain
Pistomechanics studies the machinery in order to make an installation visible while it is running, rather than to run it better. No evidence decides this, it is a choice about use, and saying so is more honest than presenting it as a finding.
Sound moves mood, arousal and attention, and that much is measured. Whether the acoustic design of a room measurably changes what the people inside it will assent to has not been tested here, and it is a testable question with an obvious protocol.
Two kinds of thing sit in the column. An event is something that happened on a date: a grave dug, a commission reporting, a programme authorised, a drug taken. It carries a rating for how well the evidence stands, and a numbered source at the foot of the page. A book or paper is set in lighter type and marks when somebody wrote the practice down, which is usually long after it was first run.
The ratings separate what the record shows from what a reader puts into it, and the two come apart most where the material is oldest. Attested is the strongest of them and it is a modest word: the event is documented, and the rating says nothing at all about what the event meant.
The essays are where this history is argued. The timeline is what an argument has to stand on, and it is uneven on purpose: a mechanism with three events means the reading is not finished there.
Practice runs ahead of theory on every track, and the gap is measured in millennia rather than in decades. Somebody at Sungir buried two children under roughly ten thousand ivory beads twenty-six thousand years before anyone wrote a sentence about why a funeral holds a family together.
The mechanisms arrive at different times and the order is informative. Ritual formation and rhetoric are ancient. The crowd, the clinic and the advertising account are nineteenth-century arrivals. The instruments that measure a believing brain are younger than a working lifetime, which is why the newest shelf carries the fewest claims and the most publications.
Thin stretches on the page are the honest part. A track with three entries means the reading is not done rather than that nothing happened, and an instrument built to be filled should show where it is empty.