Shared synchronous ritual synchronizes the heart rates of participants and their kin
Evidence
Why would this be the case? There could be many reasons for why music is tied up with religion, but one key feature that music encourages is shared synchronous movement within the group. Singing in unison, moving or dancing together in a coordinated fashion, are the kinds of shared activities that motivated Emile Durkheim’s famously termed “collective effervescence” that is often found in religious and cultural practice. In one recent study of a fire-walking ritual in a Spanish town, Ivana Konvalinka, Dimitris Xygalatas, Joseph Bulbulia, and their colleagues found shared patterns of heart-rate dynamics among the participants and their friends and relatives, but not among random spectators. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 380
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Fire-walking ritual physiology resonates with the sacrifice theme; the physiological synchronization of bonded participants (not spectators) is exactly the kind of mechanism the fumi-e trampling is designed to shatter in the reader’s integration.
- QUESTION: The fire-walking finding distinguishes participants from friends/relatives watching — worth chasing whether bystander priest-watchers in the fumi-e scene would show similar exclusion from the physiological loop.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 380
- XREF: connects to: Synchronous movement increases trust and cooperation while reducing freeriding; Group pulse cycles reveal individual attention lapses. — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 268; Singing together bodily enacts the imagined community as unisonance — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 551 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Synchronous movement increases trust and cooperation while reducing freeriding
#corroborates(0.80) - Group pulse cycles reveal individual attention lapses.
#expands(0.75) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 268