Patrick McNamara (neuroscientist)

McNamara was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on January 4, 1956. He was admitted to University of Massachusetts Boston and studied philosophy while working full-time as a medic at Boston’s alcohol and drug detox center, where he developed an interest in disorders of mind/brain. He transferred to Boston University and switched 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 involved psycholinguistic investigations into the memory disorders associated with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. He had a postdoctoral fellowship for three years in the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA.

In 1994 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at State University College at Buffalo, NY. From 1999-2012 he was an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine; and still holds an appointment in the Department of Neurology there as Associate Professor of Neurology, although he no longer teaches. In 2005 he became the director of a research lab affiliated with BUSM and the VA and has since conducted research focusing on Parkinson's Disease, religion, sleep, and dreams. He has also recently began sponsoring graduate students through the online graduate university Northcentral University. In 2013, he was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the sleep and dreams st the website company Dreamboard.[1] He is also the founding editor of the journal Religion, Brain, and Behavior.[2]

McNamara's research is on the topics of cognition, language, and religiosity among people with Parkinson's Disease. In terms of sleep and dreams, his work has largely focused on dream content differences in Rapid Eye Movement (REM), nightmares, and attachment style. 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.[3] His current research is funded by the John Templeton Foundation for a study on cognitive and religious brain differences in people with Parkinson's Disease.[4] This study is housed at the Boston VA and incorporates neuroimaging as well.

In Religion, Neuroscience, and the Self, McNamara uses contemporary neuroscientific research on religious experience, the Self and personhood to deepen, enhance and interrogate the theological and philosophical set of ideas known as Personalism.[5] He proposes a new eschatological form of personalism that is consistent with current neuroscience models of relevant brain functions concerning the self and personhood and that 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 endpoint, which from a theological perspective that end point 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 AI, privacy and solitude, and the individual ethic of autarchy. This book is an innovative combination of the neuroscientific and theological insights provided by a Personalist viewpoint.

• Official page at Boston University