This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

On the surface, people around the world lead very different lives. Some live in bustling

cities, others in tiny villages. Some are part of vast intergenerational households, others

live on their own. People in different countries follow a bewildering

range of religious traditions, but atheism is also on the rise in many places.

When anthropologists look beneath the surface however, they often find that humans around

the world are very similar. They invoke supernatural forces when it looks like their

sports teams might lose. They take part in annual festivals that demand time, effort,

and money. They mark important moments such as marriages, births and deaths with intricately

choreographed scripts. These festivals, rights and scripts are so much a part of all our lives

that few of us stop to ask why we perform them.

This week on Hidden Brain, the deep history and powerful psychology of rituals.

Anthropologist Dmitri Zigalata works at the University of Connecticut. His research

is taken him across the planet. In his travels, Dmitri has found common cultural practices

among people living in far-flung places. Many of these practices involve dangerous, difficult

or expensive rituals. The rituals themselves are often dramatic. They are also regularly

incomprehensible to outsiders. But when you peer beneath the surface, rituals actually

reveal a great deal about the human mind and the psychological features that people around

the world have in common. Dmitri Zigalata's welcome to Hidden Brain.

Hi, Shankar. Thank you for inviting me. Dmitri Zigalata, you found yourself in the Spanish

village of San Pedro, Manrique. You met a man named Alejandro. How did you first come

into contact with him? I was doing a research on fire-working rituals in Greece. That

...