Below is a lightly edited transcript of 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—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.