Patrick McNamara (neuroscientist)

Patrick McNamara (born 1956) is an American neuroscientist. His work has centered on three major topics: sleep and dreams, religion, and mind/brain.

Biography

McNamara was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on January 4, 1956. McNamara’s father was a career U.S. Air Force officer, so the family lived all around the world until McNamara was seventeen years old. When the family returned to Massachusetts, he began to study philosophy part time at University of Massachusetts Boston. In his twenties he began a period of what he describes as a very fruitful period of in-depth personal exploration of differing spiritual disciplines and philosophical traditions culminating in a life-long distinctive orientation in his philosophical outlook. He returned to college at twenty-seven years old, this time at Boston University, switching his major area of study to neuropsychology, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Boston University in 1991. His doctoral project (under Laird Cermak) involved psycholinguistic investigations into the memory disorders associated with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. He had a postdoctoral fellowship under Martin Albert, Lorane Obler, Harold Goodglass and Edith Kaplan for three years in the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA (Veterans Administration).

After brief teaching stints at several New England colleges and universities, he left academia, saying it made him ill. He then became an independent researcher with a grants-dependent research appointment in the Department of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. From 2000 to about 2018 he won and subsisted upon several research awards from various funding agencies, foundations and private groups – always avoiding official academic conferences, appointments and ideologies as much as possible. Operating as an independent researcher allowed him to pursue his unusual scientific and philosophic interests including sleep and dreams, neuroscience, philosophy and religion.

In 2022, McNamara, along with Dr. Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University, received a major award from the Templeton Foundation for his seminal contributions to the emerging scientific field of the cognitive neuroscience of religion (See: https://www.cognitiveneuroscienceofreligion.org/)

Research

In terms of sleep and dreams, McNamara's work has largely focused on the evolution of R.E.M. sleep, the social simulation hypothesis on dream content, and the links between R.E.M. dreams and religious consciousness. Throughout his writings his philosophy is personalist in orientation. He sees religion as a practice that enhances individuality and reproductive fitness and that this is in tension with religion's group-enhancing functions.

In his recent philosophical work, Religion, Neuroscience, and the Self, McNamara uses contemporary neuroscientific research on religious experience, the self, and personhood to explore the theological and philosophical set of ideas known as personalism. He proposes a new eschatological form of personalism that is consistent with current neuroscientific models of relevant brain functions concerning the self and personhood and which can meet the catastrophic challenges of the 21st century. Eschatological Personalism, rooted in the philosophical tradition of “Boston Personalism”, takes as its starting point the personalist claim that the significance of a self and personality is not fully revealed until it has reached its end-point, which from a theological perspective can only occur within the eschatological realm. That realm is explored in the book along with implications for personalist theory and ethics. Topics covered include the agent intellect, dreams and the imagination, future-orientation and eschatology, phenomenology of time, social ethics, love, the challenge of artificial intelligence, privacy and solitude, and the individual ethic of autarchy. This book is a combination of the neuroscientific and theological insights provided by a personalist philosophy.

His two books published in 2022 are “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experiences (C.N.R.E.)” and “The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams”, both published by Cambridge University Press. The C.N.R.E. text provides an up-to-date review of the neurology of religious experiences. McNamara applies predictive processing and free-energy principles to every key topic in the book.

Among the many topics explored, the C.N.R.E. book includes the following:

• Findings on religious experiences associated with psychedelics
• A new neurobiology and theoretical treatment of rite and the ritualization process
• Implications of evolutionary genetic and sexual conflict for all key religion and brain topics
• The psychology, neurobiology and phenomenology of mystical states and experiences
• A systematic psychology, philosophy, and neurobiology of self-transformation in relation to religious practices
• A new theory of religious group effects rooted in evolutionary neurobiology and examines its relevance for functions of religion
• Evidence for, relevance to religion of, and an exposition of the new theory of “Theory of Group Mind – ToGM” which stipulates that humans (and brains) aim to cognize both individual and group minds
• Empirical and theoretical work as well as neural correlates of religious language
• The evolutionary background, clinical neurology, and philosophical phenomenology of the relation of schizophrenia to religion and brain topic areas
• Insights of cultural evolutionary models to religion and brain topics
• Insights of the 4E paradigm to examine the extent to which religion and brain processes are embedded, extended, enacted and embodied
• R.E.M. sleep neurobiology and dreams are systematically incorporated into topics on religion and brain

Books

Published

• Patrick McNamara, The cognitive neuroscience of religious experience. 2nd edition; Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1108833172
• Patrick McNamara, The neuroscience of sleep and dreams. 2nd edition; Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1316629741
• Patrick McNamara, The cognitive neuropsychiatry of Parkinson's Disease, MIT Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-262-01608-7
• Patrick McNamara, The neuroscience of religious experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0521889582
• Patrick McNamara, An evolutionary psychology of sleep and dreams. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 9780275978754
• Patrick McNamara and Wesley J. Wildman, Science and the world's religions, Praeger, 2012, ISBN 978-0313387326
• Patrick McNamara, Where God and science meet : how brain and evolutionary studies alter our understanding of religion, Praeger Publishers, 2006, ISBN 0275987884
• Patrick McNamara, Nightmares : the science and solution of those frightening visions during sleep, Praeger, 2008, ISBN 978-0313345128
• Patrick McNamara, Spirit possession and history: History, psychology, and neurobiology. Westford, CT: ABC-CLIO. 2011.
• Patrick McNamara, Mind and variability: Mental Darwinism, memory and self. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood Press. 1999.

Edited

• Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara, Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams, Greenwood, 2012, ISBN 978-0313386640

External links

• Official page at Boston University