Eleanor B. Schille-Hudson - About Me

Eleanor B. Schille-Hudson

Current Work

My most recent research projects investigate the effects of practice on experience and perceptual learning. I find religion (both religious practice and religious experience) to be a rich source for this work, but lately also mathematicians(!). These are a few projects I am working on:

Prayer and Spiritual Experience

What is the relationship between prayer and spiritual experience? Using quantitative evidence drawn from ethnographic interviews and briefer psychological interviews in five countries, and online survey data with nearly 1800 participants, we argue that the amount of time spent in prayer increases spiritual presence events and increases the frequency and variety of some kinds of events more than others. (Read the paper in Cognitive Science here. The next steps for this project are to design a big experiment where we can longitudinally track the effects of prayer over time.)

Mathematical Hallucinations

How do you think about a five dimensional object? An infinite series? Could you visualize them somehow? Mathematicians occasionally report visualizations as a part of doing mathematics, but the nature and frequency of these experiences is unknown. The goals of this project are to advance our understanding of the distribution and character of reportable experiences of non-physical entities in mathematics. A survey of expert mathematicians suggests that these experiences are pretty common and increase with expertise! (Paper in prep)

Background

Since January 2023, I have been a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Stanford University, working with Tanya Luhrmann in the Department of Anthropology. My work has been funded by a series of large, multi-institution grants from the John Templeton Foundation: from 2023-July 2025, Perceiving Divine Presences, and since August 2025, The Cultivation of Spiritual Experiences in the Spiritual but not Religious. On these projects, I get to collaborate with interdisciplinary teams including philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and anthropologists. (My role is often as the resident experimental psychologist/statistician.)

I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science & Cognitive Psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington in December, 2022. My faculty advisors were David Landy (now at Netflix) and Rob Goldstone. Before that, I also completed my bachelor's at IU in Cognitive Science, working with Peter Todd and Fritz Breithaupt (now at UPenn).

As an undergrad, I spent a lot of time in Germany--first as a research intern at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, working with Stefan Herzog and then studying abroad in Freiburg im Breisgau. (At some point I had C1 proficiency and could send a killer administrative email. Now, I'm really good at ordering ice cream for the group auf Deutsch.)

I grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, in the shadow of Purdue University, where my dad is a professor of medieval philosophy. (I also spent some time in Köln, Germany.) I now live in Bellingham, Washington (it's a remote postdoc!), where my husband is the professor of classical guitar at Western Washington University. I am passionate about hobbies and I have acquired many: I grew up playing classical violin, lately I have been dabbling in old-time and Celtic fiddling; I love to sew and make many of my own clothes; I love to read (preferably in a 3:1 ratio of fiction:non-fiction), etc. etc.

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