An Ancient Solution to Modern Problems

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. On the surface, people around the world lead very different lives. Some live in bustling cities, others in tiny villages. Some are part of vast intergenerational households. Others live on their own. People in different countries follow a bewildering range of religious traditions, but atheism is also on the rise in many places.

When anthropologists look beneath the surface, however, they often find that humans around the world are very similar. They invoke supernatural forces when it looks like their sports teams might lose. They take part in annual festivals that demand time, effort and money. They mark important moments such as marriages, births and deaths with intricately choreographed scripts. These festivals rites and scripts are so much a part of all our lives that few of us stop to ask why we perform them. This week on Hidden Brain, the deep history and powerful psychology of rituals.

Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas works at the University of Connecticut. His research has taken him across the planet. In his travels, Dimitris has found common cultural practices among people living in far flung places. Many of these practices involve dangerous, difficult or expensive rituals. The rituals themselves are often dramatic. They're also regularly incomprehensible to outsiders. But when you peer beneath the surface, rituals actually reveal a great deal about the human mind and the psychological features that people around the world have in common. Dimitris Xygalatas, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Hi Shankar. Thank you for inviting me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Dimitris, some years ago you found yourself in the Spanish village of San Pedro Manrique, and you met a man named Alejandro. How did you first come into contact with him?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

So I was doing research on fire walking rituals in Greece. That was for my doctoral research. And after that, I found out that there's another place in Europe where firewalking rituals are performed, and this is the small village called San Pedro Manrique. So I just showed up there. I started asking people if they knew about this ritual, and as it turns out, it was a really big deal in that community. So one of the first people who others pointed me to was Alejandro. People hold him in very high esteem in that village because he's one of the oldest fire walkers and he in fact has been doing this ritual for many decades.

Shankar Vedantam:

So I understand that he was in his seventies when you were talking with him. Can you paint me a detailed picture of the fire walking ritual as it was practiced in this small Spanish village?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

We are talking about a village of 600 inhabitants that is in the middle of pretty much nowhere, and yet people have built this large open amphitheater that can host 3,000 spectators. And they only use it once a year for the purposes of this ritual, so clearly this is very important to them.

On the summer solstice, every June people start gathering in the central square. They engage in all kinds of processions and other celebrations throughout the day. And in the evening, they all join hands and they form this human chain and they start marching up the hill in lockstep towards that venue. And once everybody takes their place at exactly midnight, people start taking off their shoes and they face a large pit of coals. This has been produced by two tons of Oakwood that has been burning for hours, and it forms this bed of glowing coals. We actually measured the temperatures there at 1,200 fahrenheit. That's enough to melt aluminum.

Shankar Vedantam:

My gosh.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

And while faced with this bed of coals, they take somebody on their back and they walk barefoot across it on the burning fire.

Shankar Vedantam:

Wow. And this was true of Alejandro as well. He would carry someone across this bed of fire?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Correct. In fact, one time when I saw him carry his niece, who was significantly larger than him. Alejandro is a tiny man, so he struggled to balance her on his shoulders. People offered to help him, but then he just waved his hand and he went through and did it.

Shankar Vedantam:

You once asked Alejandro if he would ever stop engaging in this ritual. Can you translate what he told you, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

He looked at me, he thought about it for a while and he says, "Well, I suppose that day will come, but when it does, I will just not go up there." And I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "Well, I cannot go there because if I do that, if I saw it without being able to do it, I would climb on the bell tower and jump off and kill myself."

Shankar Vedantam:

So the following year, Alejandro got some news from his doctor. What was it, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

I heard from Alejandro's son, Mamel, that his doctor told him he had detected some arrhythmia in his heart and therefore he banned him from doing the ritual. But things took a dramatic turn that night. I was in the central square with his son, preparing for the procession that will lead us to the venue. And at some point, Mamel pulled me out of the chain. I said, "What's happening?" Mamel says, "Come with me and you'll see." So he took me to his father's house and he announced, he said, "Dad, I know you cannot do the ritual, so I'm going to carry you through the fire."

And Alejandro just looked at him for a few seconds. He hugged him, and then they cried together. So we left the house and we walked towards the venue, and indeed Mamel was one of the first persons to walk across the fire. He took off his shoes, he took his father on his back, and he crossed the burning coal. At that point, the crowd was ecstatic, everybody was cheering. His family rushed to hug him, but then suddenly Alejandro turned towards them and with a sharp gesture, he told them to stop. Everybody went completely silent. 3,000 people. You could hear a pin drop as Alejandro turned around facing the fire, and he just went ahead and crossed it again by himself this time.

Shankar Vedantam:

You talked to Alejandro about his choice to endanger his heart against his doctor's advice. What did he tell you afterwards, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

It was actually not the first time I've heard this from a fire walker. He said something like, "My doctor said that if I do the fire walk something terrible might happen to my heart, but does he know what will happen to my heart if I don't do the fire walk?"

Shankar Vedantam:

It seems almost that there is a theme that shows up again and again in your research into rituals. When you look at them from the outside, they can seem incomprehensible, bewildering. But seen from the inside, the people who practice these rituals really cherish them even when they carry significant costs. And in some ways that's what you were hearing from Alejandro, wasn't it?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Absolutely, yes. Across all kinds of different contexts, they carry so much meaning that people consider them to be a fundamental part of who they are as individuals and an equally fundamental part of their collective identity, who they are as group members.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've looked at one example of a ritual that carried enormous physical risks, but of course, rituals also carry other forms of risks and other costs. Tell us what pilgrims endured during the Kumbh Mela Festival in India.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

The Kumbh Mela is one of the most important Hindu pilgrimages in the world, and this is arguably the biggest congregation of human beings in known history. Last time somebody counted, there were about 150 million people attending the festivities. It takes place every 12 years, and it happens on the banks of four sacred rivers, the Ganges being one of them. And people might take several weeks to travel there from all parts of India and beyond. And when they reach it, the festival lasts for a month. Some people actually stay for the entire month. And during that month, you can imagine it's such an incredibly crowded place, people live in tents, they bathe in the river, they drink from the river, and the Ganges is possibly the most polluted river on earth. So there's definitely a high risk of infectious diseases spreading. It's very hot during the day, but it's freezing cold during the night. So this ritual is full of hardship.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, at a more prosaic level, you've also studied rituals that are just financially costly. Many rituals fall under this category, certainly staying in a place like India. There are many families in India who celebrate weddings by going into extreme debt. Can you talk about that, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

This is something that is actually very similar to what I've seen in my home country. I come from Greece, so in rural areas of Greece, certainly when I was younger, when I was a kid, I've seen many instances of people going into debt to finance their children's wedding. In India, there's this local NGO, which estimated over 60% of all Indian households, they turn to money lenders in order to finance their children's weddings. And of course they have to pay extortionate rates. And in many cases, they will sign contracts that get them into voluntary servitude over a period of year. So indentured labor to be able to pay those debts off.

Shankar Vedantam:

So hearing about these ordeals, people on the outside might wonder why would anyone voluntarily go through such hardship? And one thing you've done is actually ask participants that very question. And you've discovered a paradox when you ask someone like Alejandro or a pilgrim in the Kumbh Mela why they do what they do. What do they tell you, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

I have asked hundreds if not thousands of people this question, why do you do your rituals in general, or why do you do this particular ritual? And one of the most astonishing things that never ceased to amaze me is that even in the case of rituals that involve extraordinary material costs, physical effort, physical risks, most people would just look at me and say, "What do you mean why we do our rituals? This is just what we do. This is who we are."

Shankar Vedantam:

You call this the ritual paradox. Unpack that idea for me.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

The paradox is that on the one hand, people attribute tremendous meaning and importance to those rituals. Sometimes they'll tell me this is the most important event of their lives, and yet when I ask them why they do it, they very often cannot come up with an answer.

Shankar Vedantam:

So you had firsthand experience of what it was like to participate in one of these rituals when you were a small boy growing up in Greece. I understand when you were eight years old, your dad took you on an important, let's call it an expedition. Can you describe where he took you and what you saw?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

This was a football stadium. And by football I mean what in the United States people call soccer, what's in many parts of the world, my home country included, can be an almost religious like activity. People have very strong loyalties towards their team. So at eight years old, I went into a stadium packed with 45,000 people. And I noticed that as soon as the game started, everybody jumped up and never sat down again. And what followed from that moment on was one of the most unbelievable experiences of my young life.

People lit thousands of flares and torches and fireworks, and the entire stadium turned into this ball of fire. It really looked like a volcano. People chanting in synchrony, jumping up and down in synchrony, lighting those flares, which of course meant that as soon as the game started, it had to be paused for several minutes just for the air to clear. And my father kept picking me up so that I could watch the game, but I didn't even care about the game. All I cared about was all of those incredible collective rituals that were happening around me.

Shankar Vedantam:

As I was hearing the story, Dimitris, I was sort of seeing the eight-year-old version of you essentially becoming an anthropologist before our eyes, sort of observing all the people around you and asking why they were doing what they were doing. But it's also the case that you became a fan of the sport, but also of this particular team.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

See, most people, they don't show up at the temple when they're eight years old just because they had an internal yearning to worship. Typically, their parents take them, but it is through the act of participation itself that one becomes religious or becomes a fan, that one gets bonded with this group of people. Because when people come together and they engage in all those kinds of ecstatic-like rituals, this conglomeration of individuals ceases to be that. And suddenly it becomes one unified group. And even from the perspective of an eight-year-old looking at this group, that's exactly what it seemed like. It ceased to be 45,000 individuals, and it was simply one large pulsating unity that was chanting and it was jumping up and down together as if it was a single organism, and I was part of it.

Shankar Vedantam:

When we come back, the psychology of how and why rituals affect us so deeply. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the University of Connecticut anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas has found that rituals exact significant costs in time, money, even pain and suffering from the people who practice them. Irrational economists might say it would make more sense for people to make sacrifices for activities that improve their lives in some tangible way. But everywhere and in every age, including our own people, divert significant attention to seemingly ceremonial activities.

Dimitris, you called this the ritual paradox. From the outside, rituals seem pointless, and yet they're experienced by participants as something truly vital. In your book, Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, you say that it's a mistake to think of rituals as primarily being about what we do in the outside world. The real purpose of rituals is for us to hack into our own inner worlds?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Absolutely. And the idea is that just because ritual does not have any immediate direct effects on the physical world, this does not mean that it has no impact at all. In fact, it has a huge impact on our internal world, the way we perceive ourselves, the way we feel, the way we connect with other people and ultimately our wellbeing and our quality of life.

Shankar Vedantam:

One immediate question is why we need to do this because after all, we are capable of introspection. We are capable of reflection. There are a lot of ways that we can talk to our internal selves. What is it about the challenges we face in life that prompt us to do things on the outside? Things like walking across a bed of fire to change what's happening inside our own minds?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Well, the simple answer here could be because it simply works. Sometimes we don't really have to understand that a particular behavior helps us reduce anxiety or cope with grief or connect with other people. But viscerally it does so. So when we go out and we dance and sing with our friends, we don't stop to ask the question, why are we doing this? Isn't dancing pointless? And yet there's a fundamental function to acts like dancing or singing or celebrating or performing any kind of ritual together.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the really interesting ideas that you and others explore is that there is something of a mismatch between the minds that have been handed down to us by evolution, our physical brain and the challenges that we're often called to address in the actual world. And I'm not a fan of the idea that the brain is like a computer. The metaphor is not exact. But if you were to think about the brain as a computer, it's almost as if this computer was designed to solve a set of problems, but the problems have now changed in some dramatic way and we have a software patch that can essentially get this older computer to function in this newer environment. Is that the connection that you would make with rituals, that rituals in some ways are functioning like a software patch?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Yes. That's a good analogy, I think. One example would be the way we handle stress and anxiety. Stress is a useful thing. It's an adaptive response. It motivates our behavior. It motivates us to seek solutions, to avoid certain things that are stressful to us. But in the modern context, we see that levels of anxiety are higher than ever. That's because our environment has changed, not our biology. We're living a life that is way faster than anything our ancestors would've experienced. We're living in a social context where most of us, or many of us at least live very far away or removed from our social support networks, our family, our best friends. We move around, we live with anonymous strangers and all that can be very stressful.

So by finding ways of soothing these kinds of anxieties and these kinds of pressures, we might be able to solve these new problems that our biology has not had time to solve. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to an anthropologist called Bronisław Malinowski. Malinowski noticed that in Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean where he was doing his fieldwork, the local fishermen would perform a lot of rituals before going out to fish in the open sea, but not before going out to fish in the shallow waters of the lagoon.

Now, he surmised that this was because fishing in the ocean is dangerous, it's stressful and it's uncertain. You never know what you're going to catch. You never know if you're even going to come back alive if you have to battle the waves and hunt sharks and whales. And this is a theory that has been taught to anthropology students for about a century, but there was very little evidence to support it. Within the last couple of decades, we now have tangible evidence that ritual actually helps alleviate anxiety.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of these studies took place on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Tell me about that experiment, Dimitris, and what you found.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

For this study we went into a small fishing village and there's a Hindu temple there. The local women will visit this temple frequently and they will perform these prayers. They consist of repetitive movements performed in front of several statues of the Hindu pantheon.

And before going in there, we used an anxiety-inducing technique. So we asked them to think about natural disasters like cyclones and floods. And this is very salient to this island because it's very often threatened by such natural disasters. And then we allowed them to do their rituals in their normal way. And we also had a control group who went into a secular space and spent the equivalent amount of time just sitting down. And afterwards, we measured their anxiety levels, both in terms of how they perceived their anxiety and in terms of what their body said. We measured heart rate variability, which is an indication of our body's ability to cope with stress. And we found that performing this ritual actually helped people reduce their anxiety more than those in the control group.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering how this actually works inside our minds, Dimitris. How is it that rituals can actually soothe people's anxiety? What is it that they're doing, do you think?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

So the idea that my colleagues and I are proposing here is related to the way our brain works. Our brain is not just a computational machine, it's a predictive machine. It makes active inferences about the state of the world. Our brain does this in all kinds of contexts and all the time. This is a very useful cognitive architecture to have, of course. But one byproduct of that architecture or one side effect is that when there's uncertainty in the world where we cannot make accurate predictions, we experience anxiety and we think this is exactly where ritual comes in, because if ritual is anything, it is structure, it is predictability. When I engage in a ritual, I know exactly what to do. I know exactly when to do it and how. This gives my brain a sense of control. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether this sense of control is real or illusory, as long as it has tangible effects. And we do see that it does.

Shankar Vedantam:

There's been research showing that performing rituals doesn't just make people feel better. It can actually lead to better outcomes. One study investigated the effect of a made up ritual on people's performance in a stressful activity. Can you tell me what that study found, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Yes. This was a study performed by Alison Brooks who asked people to prepare in order to engage in a series of stressful tasks. Those were tests like taking a maths test or participating in a public hierarchy competition. So the researchers ask participants to either perform an artificial ritual which resembled the magical spell or perform no ritual. The ritual was consistent in drawing a picture of how they're feeling right now and then sprinkling salt on the picture, counting up to five, and then ritually destroying the paper. What they found was that performing this type of ritual help people actually perform better. So they evaluate the karaoke performances or the mathematical tests, and they saw that people were able to perform better and of course not through some kind of magical causation. When they looked at the mediating factors, they found that it was through the reduction of anxiety and an increased sense of control that they were able to improve their performance.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've looked at different ways in which rituals might help us address questions of uncertainty, questions of stress. Another problem of living that rituals address is the pain of loss and grief. Dimitris, can you help us understand why there are so many rituals associated with death and dying?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Every human society we've known has had elaborate burial rituals. Now why is that? Well, this again has to do with the way our brain works. We are hyper social animals, and as hyper social animals, we have a number of particularly strong forms of attachment. We see, for example, that when young children are separated from their parents, they experience what we call separation anxiety. When lovers experience a breakup, they might go through this very painful period. And when we look at it from this perspective, we realize that the capacity to grieve may have stemmed from evolutionary adaptations, but grief itself is not adaptive. There's an obvious benefit to the child who experiences anxiety when separated from its mother because they can cry for help. But when we lose somebody because they're no longer with us, there's not much else we can do. So from that perspective, grief is not necessarily very adaptive. And to be able to cope with these debilitating emotions such as the experience of loss and the fear of our own mortality, every human culture has developed a set of rituals.

Shankar Vedantam:

And what do you think these rituals are doing? I mean, is it the case that they're actually ameliorating our grief, channeling our grief in a new direction? What do you think the rituals are accomplishing here?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

They can make the process of separation from the deceased a little bit more gradual. So they give us time to digest the fact that they're no longer with us. And if you look at burial customs throughout the world that you'll see, you will see in a lot of those customs, they involve keeping the deceased in the house for one day, three days, a week, in the case of some tribes even for a year. Another thing they do is that they help keep the deceased alive in our memories. So they now turn them into ancestors, they turn them into beings with which we will interact in the future again, through these periodic rituals who will make offerings for them, and therefore they provide a sense that they're still with us, just in some different way.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've looked at two areas where rituals can be very helpful in managing anxiety and in managing grief. A third problem of living has to do with the challenges that come from living in groups, getting people to coordinate and cooperate with each other, especially as you point out in modern societies where large numbers of people are living amongst strangers. How do rituals help us rise to this challenge, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

This is perhaps the biggest of all challenges for us because we are a social species, but once again, we now live in conditions that are very different. So now we live in these very large societies along with strangers and cooperation is always going to be a problem. And this is why we have more collective rituals than any other animal. In order to get people to feel more bonded and cooperate.

For example, collective rituals might have people dress in similar ways. There are studies that show that when people appear to be similar, our brain makes inferences that they are indeed similar because also in nature, people who look like us, they're more likely to be our relatives. Another way is to align our movements. So we move in synchrony, we chant in synchrony. And again, there are studies that show that people who move in synchrony, they feel closer to each other, they have more rapport and they like each other more.

Another way is to align our emotions. When we feel the same thing again, we feel more connected because who are the people that you feel the same things with? Who are the people that you will mourn with and you will laugh and you will cry with? Typically, those are members of your family and your close friends. And by getting anonymous strangers to do those things together, rituals can create this sense of community and likeness.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've looked at several ways in which rituals can produce social good, but any psychological force that is powerful enough to get people to walk over burning coals can also have bad outcomes. I want you to listen to this news report from CBS News about a student's death in California.

News Announcer:

Good morning. Noah Domingo's blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit. The UC Irvine freshman was found unresponsive and the house behind me after a party in January. His father says Noah was taking part in a dangerous and long-standing fraternity ritual where Noah was compelled to guzzle a so-called family drink to become part of his big brother's family.

Shankar Vedantam:

Dimitris, talk about the connection between the bonding power of rituals and the initiation rights we see at college fraternities.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

So these types of rituals, the very intense types of rituals, they actually do carry great risks. And these risks have to outweigh the costs. So if you think of the kinds of contexts in which these rituals would've been used, societies that face more warfare, for example, they have more intense initiation rituals. And it is one thing to go through an initiation ritual that involves a lot of pain and suffering even. If you're doing this with the elders of your community, your cohort, everybody you grew up with. And that's a ritual that has been performed for 1,000 years. So there's a lot of trial and error going on.

But when we take those rituals out of context and we perform them for no good reason, perhaps for fun, they can become something very different. It's a very different thing to take that ritual out of context, tweak it, and try to use it to get the same benefits in an entirely different setting.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the things that I find fascinating about your work is that in recent years, you've started to use technology to assist you in understanding how rituals work. And one of the forms of technology you are using are heart monitors. So using heart monitors, you've collected data during the San Pedro fire walkers, you found something extraordinary in the heart monitor data when it came to what was happening in different people's bodies at the very same time. What did you find, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

This project started from hearing some of the things that people were telling me in San Pedro. Again and again, I heard them say the same thing. They say that when you go up there, there are 3,000 people, but you feel like one. They said things like, "I cannot put it into words," they would say, "But there's this feeling of togetherness, like our emotions are aligned." And this to me sounded very much like what early anthropologists had said.

Émile Durkheim described this feeling of collective effervescence. He described it as if there was this jolt of electricity running through a group of people that congregated and turning them from a group of unrelated individuals into this cohesive group. So I started thinking, "How do we actually measure this feeling of oneness, this ineffable feeling of emotional alignment and that my participants describe, but nobody has actually demonstrated?" So what we did is that we put those monitors on fire walkers, but also members of the group who were just watching and even unrelated strangers who had been there just as curious tourists to watch the festival.

What we found is that during the ritual, their heart rates began to synchronize to a really impressive degree. In fact, they were more synchronous during the ritual where some of them are walking on fire, some are watching, some are preparing for their own walk. They were more synchronous during that time than the time they were marching up the hill in synchrony. But we also find that this effect only holds for group members, because we also mapped the social network of the village. So we knew who was related to whom and to what degree, whether by blood or by friendship. And we see that we can actually use the degree of social proximity to predict the degree of physiological synchrony. So this is a fundamentally social phenomenon.

Shankar Vedantam:

When we come back, in an increasingly rational world that looks with suspicion at anything that smacks of superstition, how do we harness the psychological power of rituals? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas is the author of Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. He's found that over a very long span of time, groups of humans in different parts of the world have independently honed in on the basic elements of rituals that make them effective in manipulating our inner thoughts and feelings.

Dimitris, you found that rituals always display an important characteristic, one that sets them apart from other actions. You call this causal opacity. What do you mean by this idea, and why is such causal opacity important in the performance of rituals?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

This is one of the key characteristics of ritual. In fact, it goes to the very definition of ritual. Rituals are those actions that have to be performed repeatedly, and they have some symbolic value. They're treated as special, and yet they either don't have any specific goal or there's no visible connection between the actions that one undertakes to achieve a goal and the goal itself.

So if I take a shower in order to cleanse myself, there's obvious utility to this. But if I perform a purification ritual that involves perhaps rubbing mud on my hair, there's no clear connection. There's no obvious connection between the action that I'm performing and the outcome that I'm seeking. And this is very important, because by virtue of the fact that ritual actions are arbitrary, that means that they can now take any kind of symbolic meaning. And this makes them very efficient group markers, because if we are the group that rubs mud on our hair to perform our purification rituals, then we could be fairly certain that no other group does it. And that allows us to discern those who don't belong, and also to discern the members of our own group who are more likely to cooperate with.

Shankar Vedantam:

I love this idea that in some ways rituals transform everyday actions to the realm of the symbolic. And so in some ways, the causal opacity might look like a bug, but in fact, it's actually not a bug, it's a feature.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Exactly. They're actually laboratory studies that have looked at this ability of ritual to make things special. So when they showed people different types of drinks being prepared, in one case the beverage was served in a pretty straight up way. In the other condition, it was served up in a ritualized way. So perhaps somebody would bow to it or would turn it around three times before consuming it. And then when they asked participants which drink they would prefer, when they ask them which drink they thought was better, when they asked them which drink they thought was special, they all picked the ritualized drink.

Shankar Vedantam:

So in addition to this opacity regarding cause and effect, Dimitris, you've noticed that rituals tend to have three qualities, repetition, rigidity, and redundancy. Can you explain what these are?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Ritual obviously involves a lot of repetition, once a day, once a week, once a month, once in a lifetime. But it's always repeated. But even within each particular ritual performance, there tends to be a lot of repetition. So sometimes people chant om 108 times, some people will count the rosary and perform repetitive prayers for hours. By rigidity, we refer to the fact that ritual actions must be performed in a specific way. They're actually studies that show that if you try to intervene and change the way a ritual is practiced, people get morally upset.

Now, this has actually happened historically. FDR moved Thanksgiving by a week so that the holiday period could be extended and people would spend more money, and people were morally appalled. Most states actually refused to enforce it, and they referred to it as Franksgiving and it caused an uproar. And finally, the third aspect is redundancy. And this refers to the fact that rituals go well beyond what is functionally required. What I mean by this is that maybe 20 seconds of washing your hands would be sufficient to keep them clean. But in something like a purification ceremony, the relevant rights may go on for hours or sometimes even for days.

Shankar Vedantam:

Besides the fact that rituals have these characteristics, you've conducted studies that find that when people are experiencing setbacks or anxiety or stress, their actions sometimes naturally take on some of the characteristics of rituals. Can you explain the study for me, please?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

We brought people inside a laboratory and we wanted to see whether inducing anxiety in that context would lead them to perform more ritualized behaviors. And what we found, we used motion trackers to quantify the movement of these people. And as they became more anxious based on a task that they had to perform, their behaviors spontaneously became more ritualized. So they started performing the same actions again and again and again.

Shankar Vedantam:

I think what that tells me is that when you think about how rituals evolved, it may well be that they actually evolved through these mechanisms where people were naturally turning to some of these systems in moments of stress and anxiety, and then over time, those behaviors get codified.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

That's exactly what I think happened. That ritual evolved as a sort of mental technology that helped individuals cope with all kinds of anxieties and then was co-opted by groups, by cultures who then transformed into a very important social technology.

Shankar Vedantam:

We discussed earlier how when people are engaged in a ritual, they often feel as if they're part of a larger organism. You felt this way when you were in the soccer stadium with your dad. The people at the fire walking ritual in Spain felt the same way. Is the reverse true as well? When people do things in synchrony, does it change the way they think and feel?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the reasons why rituals are so powerful. Our brain simply infers that if we move in the same way as other people, then we are more like those people and we feel more rapport with those people. This has been demonstrated by different studies, one of which we did in a laboratory where we induce synchrony. So we have people move either in tandem or with slight variations. You can imagine this as performing a dance either with somebody who's a good dancer or with somebody who's a bad dancer and sometimes forgets the steps or makes mistakes.

We found that when people moved in synchrony, their endorphin levels were elevated. Now, the release of endorphins is related to social bonding. And not only that, but we found that they liked each other more. They perceived their partners to be more cooperative, and they trusted each other more. And we see this not just in the self reports, but also in their behavior in a trust game where they actually have to trust each other with real money that they could be putting in their pockets.

Shankar Vedantam:

And of course, this now makes perfect sense why you would have so many rituals built around music and chanting, especially in group settings,

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Absolutely, dancing and singing and chanting. Those are some of the most primordial ways for human beings to connect. And you find them in all kinds of contexts and especially ritualized contexts.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the things that you say is that high arousal rituals that stimulate many of our senses at the same time, that these high arousal rituals can produce some of the most powerful effects on our emotional states and memory. What do you mean by this Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

One way in which they do this is by creating this powerful episodic memories that become a part of our autobiographical self, the very sense of who we are as a person. So some of your episodic memories may involve your first kiss or the time you found yourself in battle, or the time your house burned to the ground, so they can be some of the most important moments of your life. And those moments typically involve a lot of emotional arousal. Rituals use this by putting people into situations where they exhibit very high arousal, and they do this collectively. So when I share the same exciting moments, when I cry with you, when I laugh with you, when I'm in danger or in pain together with you, it feels like we are essentially brothers.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the implications of this, of course, is that the more important the moment, the more extravagant the ritual might need to be in order to mark that moment. Because of course, moments that are engineered to have this heightened sense of ritual significance are going to be seen as more legitimate, more important, more emotionally salient in our minds.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Exactly. And this is why, for example, you see that state rituals tend to be very extravagant. And in fact, particularly state rituals that have to do with leaders who have less popular legitimization, leaders like kings and dictators, they tend to have more elaborate, more lavish, more flamboyant rituals. That's because those rituals add to that sense of authority that they so desperately need.

Shankar Vedantam:

I wonder, Dimitris, if you could tell me about one particular night when you got to experience the power of rituals firsthand. You were conducting field work in Mauritius, and you'd been living in a coastal village for a number of weeks preparing to observe an annual fire walking ceremony. And one day you were standing near the temple when you noticed some of the local men engaged in lively discussion. And every so often they would look in your direction and eventually one of them, the temple president called you over. What did he say?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

So this was Prakash, the local temple president. And when he summed me there, he said, "Dimitris, you've been living with us for how long now?" And I said, "A couple months." And he said, "Right, so you're one of us now." And I immediately knew that he had just hadn't called me there to tell me that. And I said, "Well, I don't want to pretend to be one of you. I'm here to learn about your traditions." And he just cut me off. And he said, "Well, so you should also do the fire walk." And I was stunned by this request because in other parts of the world where I studied fire walking rituals, this would not have been allowed. This was something only for the locals.

People had either drawn their ancestry from the village or were part of this religion. My first reaction was to politely decline. I said, "I don't want to pretend to be one of you. It's very important for me to be able to document this ritual. So on that day, I'll have to take pictures and take notes." And Prakash cut me off again. And he said something like, "If God wants you to do it, you will do it." To which I responded, "Trust me, Prakash, God does not want me to walk on fire."

Shankar Vedantam:

All right, so then you're wearing your researcher hat and you're watching the fire ritual unfold. Tell me what happens next?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

So I had permission to be inside the enclosure where all the fire walkers were, because I wanted to take a photos. I was looking through my camera lens, so I didn't know what was happening around me. And the ritual itself is so captivating that I was completely immersed in this, the smells and the color of the fire and the chants, everybody chanting as people were crossing the fire one after the other, the emotions in their faces. And at some point, Prakash tapped me on the shoulder and I looked up and I said, "What?" And he said, "Stand up." And I stood up and he said, "Turn around." And I turned around and I realized that the entire village was looking at me. I was facing the fire, and everybody expected me to walk across it.

Shankar Vedantam:

What did you do, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

At that point, there was nothing else to do. Obviously I did not want to insult my hosts. It would also be humiliating to back out at that very last moment. All I had time to say was, "Please hold my camera." And then I turned and I faced the crowd. And to be honest, taking that first step is very scary, but once you've committed, your body just takes you across.

Shankar Vedantam:

Now, you were someone who knew that the temperature of the coals could range from 750 degrees to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Was that going through your mind as you stepped onto the fire?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

Of course. When you're faced with a fire like that, you cannot be unaware of the fact that you're walking on a surface that is hot enough to melt metal, and you actually feel it. You feel yourself, your face is getting roasted by that heat. And I've seen people go across that fire. I've seen the sparks fly off their feet. I was wondering whether the same thing was going to happen to me. I have seen people get hurt through the fire walking ritual, so the thought certainly crossed my mind, but I just took that first step. And just like people had described to me, your mind is completely empty. There's nothing but you and the fire.

When you're walking through the coals you go into this mode that some researchers have called flow. And in that state, your peripheral vision almost disappears. So you don't see anyone. It's just you and the fire. But there was one step in particular where I just knew this was going to leave a blister. So there was probably something sharp under my foot and it hurt and it did leave a blister afterwards. But when this adrenaline kicks in, you don't really worry about the pain. That's the last thing that you feel.

Shankar Vedantam:

What did it feel like as you got to the other side, Dimitris?

Dimitris Xygalatas:

The first thing that happens is that it's as if a cloud is lifted, so suddenly you're aware of your surroundings again. But what I also felt was this jolt of exhilaration that lasted not just for a few minutes, not just for a few hours, but in fact for several days. I was amazed at all those powerful feelings and emotions that came through such a brief moment of participation. And that got me wondering. If I as an external observer, as an anthropologist, as a visitor, as a guest in this community, if I come to experience such strong emotions through this brief act of participation, how much more powerful would that be for a person who grew up in their community, for the insiders for whom this ritual has a deep meaning connected to a thousand-year-old tradition?

Shankar Vedantam:

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut. He's the author of Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. Dimitris, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Dimitris Xygalatas:

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridgid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correl, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is a listener named Aravin. He's a financial supporter of Hidden Brain. He told us he loves listening to the show while taking walks in Hampstead Heath, a big green space in North London. Thanks so much for your support, Aravin, and for taking us along on your walks.

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