Reliving Memory and Religious Experience Through Multimodal Synchrony and Adaptation: An Adaptive Network Model

During a group worship session, through intersensory facilitation participents can experience interpersonal synchrony. In addition it may occur that seemingly forgotten memories are suddenly relived and religious experiences come up. This chapter addresses the question whether a higher-order adaptive network model can enhance our understanding of such an interplay of interpersonal synchrony and the mentioned phenomena. In the developed adaptive dynamical system model, feeling of togetherness and oneness was modelled making use of synchrony detection states. The felt presence of God was modelled through a mental God-model. The improvements in cognition perceived were modelled by introducing adaptivity of certain connections between cognitive states. The subsequent simulation provided a closer look into the inner workings of the interplay of the mechanisms involved. It was found that synchronization suddenly intensifies after some time of mutual adaptation resulting in improvements in cognition of the cognitive impaired participant.