Radek Kundt is an assistant professor at the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, where he also act as director of LEVYNA – Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion and executive board member of HUME Lab – Laboratory for Experimental Humanities. Employing evolutionary models, he studies religious behaviour in terms of intragroup cooperation and treats ritual as a communication technology.

He argues that ritual behaviour evolved to afford group coordination harnessing the commitment signalling to enhance mutual trust and to identify free-riding individuals.

Combining methods from experimental anthropology and experimental psychology, he conducted research on effects of religious priming on prosocial and moral behaviour.

He has several years of laboratory and field research experience in Mauritius and in Czech Republic.

Konrad Talmont-Kaminski is the Head of the Society & Cognition Unit at the University of Bialystok. His research focuses on the cognitive and evolutionary basis of religion. Konrad studied at the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Ontario.

He received his doctorate in philosophy from Monash University in Australia and was a fellow of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Vienna.

In 2014 he published Religion as a Magical Ideology with Routledge. In that book he argued that religions combine reliance upon cognitive by-products typical of magical beliefs and practices, as well as the function of motivating prosocial behaviour typical of ideologies. Since then, he has pursued a number of collaborative empirical efforts to explore various aspects of the account presented in his book.

Michel van Elk obtained degrees in philosophy, biological psychology and the psychology of religion.

He pursued his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, followed by a post-doc position at the UCSB in CA, (USA) and the EPFL in Switzerland. He has been affiliated as a lecturer and Fulbright scholar at Stanford University and as research fellow at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies.

After positions at the University of Amsterdam and VU University he is now affiliated as associate professor at Leiden University, where he heads the Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual and Mystical (PRSM) experiences lab.

He studies altered states of consciousness using a variety of different methods including field research, phenomenology, psychophysical tools and neuroimaging techniques.