Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 2, 2022
P. Mcnamara
35 citations
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...
February 15, 2019
P. Mcnamara
The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams provides comprehensive coverage of the basic neuroscience of both sleep and dreams for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. It details new scientific discoveries, places those discoveries within evolutionary context, and links established findings with implications for sleep medicine. This second edition focuses on recent developments in the...
The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
February 1, 2019
P. Mcnamara
Theories of REM and NREM functions we have been assuming that the sleep state is doing something for the wake state; i.e., that NREM SWS restores energy for waking consciousness or that REM supports emotional memory consolidation for waking consciousness. But it is also possible that the functions of REM and NREM have more to do with the sleep states themselves rather than with waking...
Dreaming
September 1, 2018
P. Mcnamara, Ken Moore, Y. Papelis et al.
We pilot tested the efficacy of a virtual reality-based imagery rehearsal and rescripting treatment (ReScript) for nightmares. Nineteen community volunteers (Mage = 49 years) who varied in terms of their nightmare distress levels participated in a 4-week-long trial of ReScript therapy. Participants used VR manual controls in an Oculus headset to manipulate 3 scary or threatening images per...
Journal of Cognition and Culture
August 13, 2018
P. Mcnamara, Brian Teed, Victoria Pae et al.
Purpose:To test the hypothesis that supernatural agents (SAs) appear in nightmares and dreams in association with evidence of diminished agency within the dreamer/dream ego.Methods:Content analyses of 120 nightmares and 71 unpleasant control dream narratives.Results:We found that SAs overtly occur in about one quarter of unpleasant dreams and about half of nightmares. When SAs appear in a dream...
March 1, 2002
P. Mcnamara
I hypothesize that people engage in religious practices, in part, because such practices activate the frontal lobes. Activation of the frontal lobes is both intrinsically rewarding and necessary for acquisition of many of the behaviors that religions seek to foster, including self-responsibility, impulse and emotion modulation, empathy, moral insight, hope, and optimism. Although direct tests...