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#720 Patrick McNamara - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self

The Dissenter

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The Role of the Hippocampus in Religious Experiences

There's a developing massive literature on changes in religiosity after changes in the brain. In several of these what appears to be occurring is atrophy in the medial temporal lobe on the right side. The person becomes kind of religious because they're forced to take these cosmic perspectives on this backlog of information that's not being efficiently processed through the REM sleep hippocampal system.

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