ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a commonsense definition of "ritual" and summarizes neuroscientific findings regarding human brain development, which throw light on the respective shaping roles of inheritance and experience. Human experience arrives in many forms. The chapter presents a classification relevant to ritual actions and brain systems that handle such inputs and outputs. It discusses the effect of ritual experience on the "self-other" distinction, in the context of the recent discovery of "mirror" neurons that become more active whether one performs a movement oneself or sees another person performing the same action. The power of ritual symbols has been convincingly explained by Victor Turner. Symbolic objects are typically "special" versions or arrangements of everyday objects. They are often associated with well-known stories and moral precepts, and used in a defined processual sequence. Ritual symbolism subsumes a large part of symbolic action, since much human action is ritualized. Effective ritual symbols bind together sensory, appetitive, pre-semantic experience with rational, normative cognition.
