Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Francesco Filippi (pictured below), an Italian director, screenwriter, and animator whose work can be found here . In this post he tells us about his new film, Red Hands, which addresses the theme of domestic violence. Can an animated film for teenagers have something to say to the readers of this very interesting blog which explores the boundaries of the human mind? Red Hands , an Italian 30' long film in stop-motion and 2D animation, had his premiere at the Rome Film Festival on October 20th, 2018. As you can see from the trailer  above, it's a story of domestic abuse. Ernesto, a 12 year-old boy, discovers that the magnificent red graffiti appeared on the walls of his street are made by Luna, a girl with a mysterious power. She can emit a blood-like liquid from her hands, but her power is a side-effect of her father's violence at home.

Adam Powell is a junior research fellow in theology and religion at Durham University and a core member of the ' Hearing the Voice ' project, an interdisciplinary investigation of voice-hearing (auditory verbal hallucinations) funded by the Wellcome Trust. He is the author of Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy ; Hans Mol and the Sociology of Religion and numerous essays on 19th-century religious experience. Did you have a dream last night? How do you know? Was it vivid or dull? Was it real? Was it really a dream? If it was not a dream, what was it? For those who experience hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) or hypnopompic (between sleeping and waking) hallucinations, the sense perceptions they experience in the middle of the night seem quite real. They report vivid images, felt presences, diffuse light, out-of-body experiences, and extreme emotional states like euphoria or dread. What is more, studies of prevalence estimate that 39% to 85% of the gen...

In this post, I interview Louise Moody , Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York, and Tom Stoneham , Professor of Philosophy & Dean of the Graduate Research School, also at the University of York. Tom and Louise are presently researching dreaming: specifically, they are investigating an alternative model of dreaming (one that holds dreams are confabulations on waking rather than experiences of some type that are remembered and reported as dreams) and whether this model might be beneficial for those experiencing parasomnias. SS: Why is the topic of dreaming of interest to philosophers and what contributions have philosophers made so far? LM & TS: The first thing to say is that dreaming takes up a surprisingly large amount of our mental lives with most of us apparently dreaming 4-6 times a night – indeed, awakenings from all sleep-phases (i.e. both r.e.m and non-r.e.m sleep) elicit dream reports between 50-90% of the time (e.g. Dement & Kle...

Caroline Watt This post is by Caroline Watt , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Almost 30 years ago, I became a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit . Based in the Psychology department of Edinburgh University, the KPU studies paranormal beliefs and experiences. Our work includes testing for psychic ability under controlled conditions, and investigating the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences. For the last few years, I have been studying precognitive dreaming. The belief that one's dreams predict future events is one of the more commonly reported paranormal experiences and we have investigated psychological factors that have been proposed to lead to seemingly precognitive experiences. We have looked at the role of memory bias in these experiences: specifically, the selective recall of matches and mismatches between dreams and subsequent events. Our participants remembered more than twice as many dreams that matched events ...

The workshop “Dreams, Delusions and Early Modern Literature” was held at University of Birmingham (3-4 April 2014). The workshop was organized by Ita Mac Carthy and it is a part of Balzan Prize project,  ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge‘ . The aim of the workshop was to examine early modern literary texts that theorize the nature of dreams and delusions and describe individuals who fail to distinguish between what is real and unreal. Although the workshop was mainly on literary studies, Phil Gerrans and I had the opportunity to give philosophical talks at the 'Cognitive Keywords Session'. Gerrans, on the basis of this paper, talked about both delusion and dream. According to him, dream and delusion are in a sense similar phenomena, and the similarity consists in the fact both are caused by the abnormal functioning of reality-testing system. The reality-testing system is deactivated in dreams, while it is compromised in delusion. More precisely, so-called 'defau...