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"Ritual" is the word we keep for other people's habits—the crystals, the pagans, the woo. Strip it back and your own life is wall-to-wall with them. The only difference is which ones you've decided to approve of.
“Ritual” is the word we keep for other people’s habits—the crystals, the pagans, the woo. Strip it back and your own life is wall-to-wall with them. The only difference is which ones you’ve decided to approve of.
A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")
the btrmt. lectures podcast. For the
article that inspired it, see
The value of ritual.
Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors,
and if there's one thing I've learnt as a brain scientist, it's
that there's no instruction manual for this device in our head.
But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, of
action, because that's what brains do: they create the patterns
that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. So
let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see
if it works for you.
Two rituals at opposite ends of the respectability scale
There are two things I do every week that are both drenched in
ritual, and they sit at opposite ends of some kind of social
respectability scale.
By day, I teach at the military academy at Sandhurst, and the army
fairly runs on ceremony—on drill, on parade, on the regimental
dinner, on the way you're taught to stand and fold and salute. In
my mind these are all rituals, but nobody calls them rituals. They
call them traditions, bearing, standards.
And then I'll go home and run a game of Dungeons & Dragons—grown
adults using funny voices, playing with dice around a couple of
drinks. There are rituals in that too, in game and out of game.
But say the word ritual there and it means something quite
different, and a little bit silly.
The connection between these two things might not be clear to you,
but I think there's a through line between the rituals in a dark
forest under the moonlight and the rituals we'd call traditions at
the military academy: the same machinery, prescribed actions that
we repeat to mark some kind of purpose. And when you look at that
through line, I think we learn some interesting things. So that's
what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about ritual.
Let's get into it.
Why "ritual" is a dirty word
In the absence of context, the word ritual carries a sort of
darkness. You think of rites to pagan gods, of secret, sinister
stuff—the stuff of cults, really. The kind of thing you'd
associate with a Dungeons & Dragons game. There's also a version
that's a bit more silly: ritual as woo-woo crystal people
pretending to do magic—although I'll admit that kind of thing is
becoming increasingly popular. But either way, ritual without
context belongs to the off-piste: people whose values sit at odds
with ours, people who deviate from the mainstream.
What's interesting is that when you look closely at what these
things are—what they mean, what they do—they look very similar
to what more culturally normative religions and institutions do.
Except that there, we don't call it ritual. We call it tradition.
And I think that's because we use the word ritual to delegitimise
the practices of people at odds with the mainstream.
There's also this sense that, in a fast-paced modern world,
there's no room for these outdated, trivial little practices—
these spiritual practices associated with the old world, because
we've grown out of them. Part of that relates to a
series of lectures I've done
about the growing empiricism of modern culture, the scientific
enterprise.
And part of it is because some caution is warranted. There are a
lot of charlatans out there. Whatever you believe about psychics,
I think you'd agree that most, at least, are crooks, and that most
horoscopes are fluff—the Forer effect,
or the Barnum effect, has been fleecing people forever. You've got
wellness grifters hijacking the idea of ritual to sell courses or
grow their followings online. So the idea that ritual is empty
superstition isn't always false, and some communities build on
these ideas and do themselves harm.
But concentrating on that narrative concentrates us on the wrong
part of ritual. Because if we fixate on the practitioners, we miss
the mode of action underneath—the one we rely on all the time.
What a ritual actually is
So let me see if I can convince you that when you remove the woo
from ritual—strip it back to what's underneath—we get some
interesting insights that help us navigate the world better and
come together better. And for that, we're going to have to look at
some literature.
Rituals, at their core, are procedures in which the actions follow
some prescribed form and order. The core feature of a ritual is
the ceremonial aspect: formalising some number of actions together
to recognise a purpose. And that purpose could be anything.
There's no requirement to constrain it to gods or crystals. It's
just structure in service of a purpose.
I wrote an article about mundane cults
where I talked about how important it is not to confuse religious
behaviour—ritualistic practice—with religion. Religious
behaviour is, at its core, ritualistic behaviour around some kind
of article of faith. And faith isn't confined to the world of the
spiritual.
We can't help but ritualise
The world we live in is impossibly complex. We can't possibly
verify all the information we treat as knowledge and act on. We
have to take it on faith. There are very few people listening to
this podcast—myself included—who've gone and derived the law
of gravity for themselves. We take it on faith. We trust experts:
doctors, lawyers, scientists. We can't hope to penetrate every
body of knowledge ourselves, so we're forced to defer to others.
I've got a whole lecture on sages and wisdom
and their place in modern life—we have to trust compressed
expertise even when we can't articulate it, and it would be crazy
to do anything else.
I talk a lot on my website about ideology—
these idealised rules of thumb for how the world works, that we
internalise and act on. And the core claim I want to make is that
that deferral becomes ritual. Because what else would you call
it, when we're acting on an idealised rule of thumb and the point
of the action is to adhere to that rule of thumb on faith? That's
the definition of a ritual: actions of prescribed form.
I've been thinking about this so much recently because the very
same definition applies just as easily to science. The scientific
enterprise is, in many ways, a ritual too—I did a
whole lecture on that
a couple of fortnights ago. The process of breaking the world down
into its component parts is ritualistic, built on belief in a
hypothesis that we then try to disprove, or else hold as something
that guides our action.
I won't relitigate that lecture—you can listen to it if you
want. But on this definition, it's actually difficult to find
human behaviour that isn't a ritual. Ritual is something that
can be applied loosely, and anything applied loosely starts to
lose its value. And yet I think the looser definition is
beneficial, because ritual is a technology—a social technology,
but also a personal one—for navigating the world.
Ritual is a technology
That prescribed, repeated, formal action, based on these articles
of faith and rules of thumb, does measurable work on our bodies,
and also on groups of us—on our interpersonal dynamics. Let me
walk you through some of the literature that frames this up.
There's an anthropologist, Dimitris Xygalatas, who spent years
living with fire-walkers and other people engaged in pretty
high-intensity rituals. He has a 2022 book called Ritual: How
Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, and I wanted to
draw out one example. In a study of a Spanish fire-walking rite,
he wired up the performers and the spectators, and found that
their heart rates fell into a kind of synchrony—bodies literally
beating in concert with the people performing the ritual. It was
bringing them together in a very physical way.
Or maybe you've heard of the Dunbar number. Robin Dunbar is a
fairly famous social scientist who recognised a relationship
between the size of a part of the brain called the neocortex and
the size of the social groups a creature tends to organise in.
I've got an article on this,
so I won't go into too much detail, but you can roughly predict
that humans have close friend groups
of around five, larger communities of around 100, tribal groups of
around 4,000, and so on—and when you map that onto human
society, organisations tend to fall out along those numerical
lines.
In that same tradition, Robin Dunbar was the last author on a 2015
paper with Bronwyn Tarr and Jacques Launay, looking at what other
benefits these group sizes bring. They ran a fun experiment with a
silent disco, getting people to dance in synchrony, and found that
synchronised movement on its own seemed to raise pain thresholds
and bump up social bonding—how close people felt to each other—
independent of how hard they exerted themselves. That independence
matters, because exertion releases endorphins, which raise pain
thresholds, so maybe it was just the effort. There's a lot of
literature on shared experiences at intensity—summer camps,
skydiving together—bringing people closer. But they're saying
no: it was the synchrony that mattered, not the exertion.
And if you look at a review from around the same time, 2016, by
Rachel Watson-Jones and Cristine Legare, you find that group
ritual, across a lot of measures, builds cohesion, signals
commitment, and helps a group mark who's in and who's out—which
is a fundamental feature of groups. You can't have an in-group
without an out-group. So ritual helps define a group's boundaries.
Altogether, you can see that group ritual isn't just fun. Formal,
repeated action moves your heart rate, changes your pain
threshold, and has these fairly intuitive effects on the strength
and loyalty of a group. Which tells us ritual really is a
tool—not decoration, not entertainment, but something functional
that brings us together.
The brain as an uncertainty machine
Now, I said at the top that ritual is almost necessary for
navigating a complex world. Developing ideologies, rules of thumb,
to get through a world where we can't work everything out from
first principles seems like a real benefit—it helps us move
through the world more effectively, more quickly. And in the last
25 years or so, a perspective in brain science that accords with
that idea has become really dominant. A paper from 2025 frames
ritual through exactly this neuroscientific lens.
The theory is called predictive processing—I've
written about it elsewhere,
and I'll find something that explains it better than I can
here—but it's the idea that the brain is fundamentally a device
for reducing uncertainty. One of its core jobs is to predict the
world, predict what's coming next, and help you move in a way that
minimises surprise. And there are good reasons for that: surprise
is problematic. It's cognitively costly—you have to figure out
what to do, and you can't defer your thinking. So a mechanism that
puts you on autopilot, fitting you into routines of behaviour that
match what you anticipate, keeps the processing cost low. All you
really need to respond to is when your expectations are violated.
And we see a lot of neural signals suggesting this is what the
brain is often doing: predicting the world, trying to minimise
surprise.
On this view—and thinking about the literature we just
covered—ritual is a technology specifically for managing
uncertainty. A fixed, repeatable procedure to hold onto in a world
that won't stay stable or comprehensible all the time. We ritualise
our behaviour because the world's too complex. Our biology is
overwhelmingly adapted to automate our behaviour, because that's a
graceful solution to the complexity of the world. I talk about
this a lot—our emotions
are an example, our habits
are an example—but it might be that,
at the bottom, this is what the brain is trying to do.
The limits—and why they don't undo the point
Now, that doesn't mean ritual is always good. A lot of rituals
seem obsolete, some fail us, and some are obviously harmful. Even
in the scientific literature there's contention about the value of
ritual. There's a particular paper I'm thinking of—some work by
Francesca Gino about how rituals boost your performance by calming
your nerves. If you're into rituals you've probably come across
the idea; there was a whole run of papers in the early 2020s. But
the main citation in that body of literature had to be retracted
in a data-fraud scandal—you can find it on Retraction Watch. So
the links between ritual and these physical effects: I've listed
some studies, but it's not always as obvious as it's made out to
be.
And some work by Nick Hobson and Michael Inzlicht, around 2015,
spoke to occasions where religious ritual in particular can
actually increase antisociality and hinder our self-control in
the wrong conditions. Which makes sense. I talk a lot about social
dynamics, and how [the same dynamics that bring us together for
good are the identical dynamics that bring us together for
evil](https://btr.mt/analects/social-identity-theory)—it's one of
the main things I teach about ethical leadership and ethical
decision-making at Sandhurst. The same
machinery that binds a group is the machinery that can turn it
against outsiders, in a really nasty way.
But I don't think that changes how we should understand ritual.
I've been indicating that ritual is good because it helps us
navigate the world—but it doesn't have to help us navigate the
world in a good way. My claim is that ritual is essentially what
you're doing anyway. It's a pervasive feature of the human
experience, something we can't avoid. And when we split off the
rituals we don't like by calling them rituals, and the ones we do
like by calling them traditions, it leaves us open to navigating
the world in a problematic way—because we're not examining them
with the same scepticism.
Your life is already full of them
If you just look across your day at all the things that are
functionally the same as rituals—prescribed forms repeated to
mark a purpose—there's your coffee routine, your workout
routine, your study routine, the way you tidy your desk before you
start working. Even the way you clean the house is probably
ritualised: if you've been somewhere a while, you have a
prescribed way of doing it. All of these are prescribed actions to
mark a purpose.
And when you put them against the ones we're encouraged to look
down on, they're not fundamentally different—they're
cosmetically different. The coffee routine in the morning to get
you ready for the day, and the crystal person lighting a candle
and setting their intention for the day. The neo-pagan seasonal
rite, and the way even secular people celebrate Christmas. The
person reading their horoscope to pull meaning out of their life,
and the person looking at their habit tracker to pull meaning out
of theirs. Prescribed forms to mark a purpose—and the purpose is
often very similar. They're both functional ways of navigating the
world.
The danger is that by treating them differently—sorting them by
approval—we don't look too hard at the ones we don't call
rituals. And that can be kind of problematic.
So call them rituals
Let me wrap up with some implications. Telling ourselves that
rituals are silly, outdated practices that non-mainstream people
engage in lets us believe our fast-paced, productivity-oriented
modern life has no space for this kind of thing. But if we look at
what rituals actually are, and what they're for, we find our lives
are full of them. And by calling one a ritual and another a habit,
a routine, or a tradition, we don't pay attention to the ones
we're doing in the same way.
This lecture comes out of a series examining our epistemics—the
way we decide to trust knowledge, to promote our beliefs into
knowledge. The word ritual is one of the ways we do that, but it's
not often something we choose; it's handed to us. In my lecture on
sages and wisdom,
I talk about how we call some authority figures gurus when we
distrust them—but we pick the authority figures we do trust in
exactly the same way. Or the scientific ritual,
which is about how the scientific enterprise is itself a
ritualistic practice—and, like any ritualistic practice or
belief system, is subject to errors of routine. The entire
replication crisis came out of the fact that science is, in many
ways, a ritual.
So the implication is to spend more time calling the prescribed
actions you take to mark a purpose rituals—because it'll help
you notice them, help you question them, and help you understand
whether they're rituals that actually make sense, or routines and
traditions that have been handed to you under the table. When you
start treating all these behaviours as rituals, it concentrates
you on the purpose they're supposed to achieve. And that's when
ritual becomes a technology—a tool you can use deliberately,
rather than a superstition you eschew.
We live in loops
I remember a scene from Westworld where Robert Ford says
something like: humans fancy that there's something special about
the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight
and as closed as the androids do—seldom questioning our choices,
and for the most part waiting to be told what to do next.
I think that describes ritual perfectly. We live in these loops.
And it's not the tragedy Ford makes it sound like—they're how a
tiny brain survives a big world. You've got to live in them
whether you like it or not. The question is just whether you chose
these things, or whether they were slipped under the table. And I
think by calling all of these things rituals, and concentrating on
their purpose, we might be encouraged to pay a little closer
attention.
I'll leave it there.