ANTISTRUCTURE AND THE ROOTS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: with Lluís Oviedo, “Challenges, Opportunities, and Suggestions for a Renewed Program in the Scientific Study of Religion”; Robert N. McCauley, “Recent Trends in the Cognitive Science of Religion: Neuroscience, Religious Experience, and the Confluence of Cognitive and Evolutionary Research”; Connor Wood, “Antistructure and the Roots of Religious Experience”; Konrad Szocik, “Critical Remarks on the Cognitive Science of Religion”; Hans Van Eyghen, “Religious Belief as Acquired Second Nature”; and L

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo‐Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others’ intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.