Ann Taves (born 1952) is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered (2009), stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.
[5] In March 2018, she gave the Gunning lecture at New College, Edinburgh on the topic "Religion as worldviews and as ways of life.
[7] It focuses on a class of seemingly involuntary acts alternately explained in religious and secular terminology.
These involuntary experiences include uncontrolled bodily movements (fits, bodily exercises, falling as dead, catalepsy, convulsions); spontaneous vocalizations (crying out, shouting, speaking in tongues); unusual sensory experiences (trances, visions, voices, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences); and alterations of consciousness and/or memory (dreams, somnium, somnambulism, mesmeric trance, mediumistic trance, hypnotism, possession, alternating personality).