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The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience, now updated and expanded in a new edition, updates key topics covered in the first edition including: decentering and self-transformation, supernatural agent cognitions, mystical states, religious language, ritualization, and religious group agency. It expands upon the first edition to include major findings on brain and religious experience over the past decade, focusing on methodology, future thinking, and psychedelics. It provides an up-to-date review of brain-based accounts of religious experiences, and systematically examines the rationale for utilizing neuroscience approaches to religion. While it is primarily intended for religious studies scholars, people interested in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, cultural evolution, and personal self-transformation will find an account of how such transformation is accomplished within religious contexts.
List of contents
Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction: assumptions and reasons; 2. On decentering; 3. On the self and the divided self; 4. The cultural and evolutionary background to the neuroscience of religion; 5. Neurology of religious experiences; 6. Psychedelics and religious experiences; 7. Mystical experiences; 8. Religious experiences and transformative experiences; 9. Supernatural agents and god concepts; 10. Ritual; 11. Religious language; 12. Group effects and religion.
About the author
Patrick McNamara is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University, California. For 20 years he was based at Boston University School of Medicine where he was Associate Professor of Neurology. He has published extensively on the topics of neurology and psychology of religion, including Religion, Neuroscience and the Self: A New Personalism (2020). He is a founding editor of Religion, Brain and Behavior, and co-founder of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion.
Summary
This book describes the study of self-transformation and mystical states through the methods of cognitive neuroscience. It will appeal to anyone interested in the scientific study of religion.
