When sitting in class, trying to figure out if the guy or girl across the aisle is actually smiling at you (or just bored out of his or her mind), you might be closer to Sunday church services than you think.

“Religion is really about understanding each other. We are constantly running some social cognition programs in our brains, trying to figure out what others are up to and how we should react,” said Jeppe Jensen, associate professor of religion at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

In his Thursday speech titled “Myth and Mythologies – Many Dimensions, Many Methods,” Jensen emphasized the study of religions not just as historical or ethnic developments, but as human and social constructs.

In every culture throughout history, humans have been telling stories to explain the world around them and their own existence.

For those who study religion comparatively and scholastically, this social context is an important element. They view the beliefs in the light of societal explanations and illustrations of the unexplainable in the world around them.

“Creation myths are not about creation of the world at all, they are about the identity of a people,” Jace Weaver, director of Native American studies at the University, said at Thursday’s speech.

According to Jensen, myths and religious stories are about the creation of meaningful worlds that parallel and explain our own lives.

Furthermore, progress in the field of psychology, especially neuroscience, has greatly aided research in religion, Jensen said. He said he believes religion and myth speak about the psychology of a person and can also be studied in light of psychology.

“Neuroscience, in combination with more traditional methodologies will develop a fuller, richer picture,” he said.

Jensen noted that recent research has found that when people pray, the same parts of the brain are activated as when they are having a conversation with someone who is physically present.

In other words, religious beliefs are undeniably connected to cognitive and psychological processes.

In Jensen’s opinion, people develop different religions to make sense of their world. He said people develop religious systems and stories because they like to think that there is intentionality in the world just as there is intentionality in their own actions.

Based on this view, religion and myth can be studied with a pragmatic approach and judged on the basis of their utility – not their veracity.

The purpose of religious stories and myths is to explain complicated, abstract concepts with simpler, more familiar terms, Jensen said. With this in mind, scholars can then judge the stories based on their success in performing this simplification.

But judging is not something that is emphasized in the comparative approach to religion; instead, they are studied based on their effect on a given culture and the human beings within that culture.

The comparative study of religion reveals how myths and religious stories form perceptions of the material, social, mental and symbolic worlds.

According to Jensen, whether people consciously hold religious beliefs or not, everyone is influenced by the religious stories and myths that have both molded society and been created by society.

“I think they [myths] have more of a research-oriented place in society than they used to . Now we are just analyzing them . to figure out cultural values,” Julie Kessler, a junior political science major, said after listening to the lecture.

Jensen pointed out that hunter-gatherer societies had hunter-gatherer myths, agricultural societies had agricultural myths, and hierarchical societies had hierarchical myths.

To understand our own society, it is necessary to understand the myths and religious stories that have impacted the development of our culture.

Because myths and religious stories have such a huge effect on society as a whole – as well as on the individual, Jensen emphasized the importance of the study of religion. He said he believes it should be rehabilitated not as a cultural relic, but as something that is valuable to modern society.