Prayer, a common practice across many religions, changes not only how people feel or think but also what they perceive. Across three studies with thousands of participants from five cultures, more daily time spent in prayer is associated with more frequent reports of sensory and perceptual experiences interpreted as evidence of a god or spirit. Prayer most strongly relates to everyday events like dreams or strong emotions that feel not self-generated but caused by a deity. Prayer also relates to anomalous experiences such as voices and a sensed presence, but not to more dramatic events like possession, out-of-body experiences, or sleep paralysis. These results suggest that repeated practices can shape perception.
In communities where hearing voices is common and expected, people are taught cultural models to identify and explain voice-like events. These communities share common features: they teach discernment to accurately identify the legitimate voice of a spirit or being, and they use two methods to enable experiencing spirits—trained attention to inner experience and repeated speech to the invisible other. The ability to hear spirits becomes more skilled with practice, and what is heard becomes clearer over time. Despite shared cultural ideas, individual variation in experience exists, some possibly reflecting psychotic process. Voice-like events may be shaped by cognitive expectation, trained practice, and an experiential pathway.