Book Review: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience, Second Edition by Patrick McNamara
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self, 2nd Edition, by Patrick McNamara (Author), Cambridge University Press: 2022
The work identifies the brain’s facilitation of supernatural agent cognitions, decentering and self-transformation, mystical states, religious language, ritualization and religious group agency.
The book provides a complete account of how evolution shaped the brain in such a way as to promote processes of self-transformation and mystical states which we now call religion. The book will be of interest to people interested in the transformative power of religion. While it is primarily directed toward religious studies scholars, people interested in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, cultural evolution, psychedelics, mystical states and personal self-transformation will find a complete account within the book of how that personal transformation is accomplished within religious contexts.
In applying an evolutionary neuroscience approach to religion the book updates neuroscience studies of brain and religion, reviews the neurology of decentering and self-transformation, brain facilitation of mystical states, applies predictive processing insights to supernatural agent cognitions, extends ToM mindreading accounts to theory of the religious group mind or group agency, incorporates the neurobiology of REM sleep and dreaming into the neurology of religious experiences, reviews neurological disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, TLE, OCD, FTD, ASD etc) that involve changes in religious cognition, provides a neurobiology and theory of religious ritual and ritualization and systematically examines rationale for utilizing neuroscience approaches to religion.
