CIÊNCIAS COGNITIVAS DA RELIGIÃO E O ESTUDO DA PESQUISA SOBRE DESENVOLVIMENTO RELIGIOSO, MENTES ORDINÁRIAS E EXTRAORDINÁRIAS E AUTOCONSCIÊNCIA

Abstract

The present work aimed to present to the community of researchers of religion in Brazil the perspective of research in Cognitive Science of Religion (CCR), in terms of its general epistemological and theoretical aspects, exemplifying this novel approach to the scientific study of religion with details of three of his contemporary lines of research: development of religiosity, ordinary and extraordinary minds, and self-awareness. This theoretical essay, aiming at the presentation of the area, used research in several academic repositories (SciElo, BVS, PsycNet and Portal de Periódicos CAPES) in order to assess state of the art relevant to the three thematic areas mentioned in their theoretical interrelationships and links, in CCR studies. With an essentially cognitive focus, CCR understands the human not as a passive recipient of culture, but as an active agent to filter and process information through cognitive processes, modifying the forms of "religion" as a cultural product for a set of linked behaviors and beliefs to religiosity; its focus is on the products of the religious affiliation of the dialogic cognition-culture relationship. The study presents the organizational and functional dynamics that link religiosity to the cognitive processes of developing the subjective sense of the sacred, ordinary, and extraordinary minds and self-awareness in the intricate exchanges with the socio-ecological and cultural contexts of the functioning of the self. Finally, this essay in free meditation format, theoretically grounded, sensitizes the community of empirical researchers of religion in Brazil to carry out studies with a cognitive focus, according to the premises of the CCR as a flourishing field in the sciences, aiming at the documentation and better understanding of the religion in an autochthonous context with the local coloring of its expressions, safeguarding the peculiar feature of the expressions of religiosity in the context of Portuguese speakers in Brazil.

Keywords: Cognitive science of religion, cognitive psychology, religious development, ordinary and extraordinary minds, self-awareness.