ABSTRACT
What can contemporary science contribute to our understanding of the complexity of human experience, to moments of cosmic insight, feelings of profundity, mystical ecstasy, spiritual callings, supernatural sightings, or even the basic experiences accompanying watching the sunset or walking through a previously unknown place? There has been a tendency to neglect the meaningful experience and instead focus on experience as it relates to physiology, the integration of sensory inputs, or compartmentalized mental processes. But the world for us is not simply sensory information to be processed and acted upon or stored and retrieved; these perspectives only scratch the surface of human consciousness. In contrast to this, the chapters of this section treat experience in its depth and complexity; they focus on the specifically human dimensions of experience, experience infused with signs and symbols – for example, how the mere words of a political speech can bring us to tears (Chapter 4), how bread can taste like meat in religious ritual (Chapter 5), and how we can relive the embodied feeling of contact with objects, others and social conventions in remembering (Chapter 6). Experience as such deserves to be at the center of our inquiry, a basic unit of analysis irreducible to sensory input.
