Imperfect Cognitions

Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “ On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments ”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology . Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group. Víctor Verdejo We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept. Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership ...

This post is by Marc Wittmann , Research Fellow at the Institute of Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Here, he writes about his new book on altered states of consciousness. Subjective time emerges through the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity. This is clearly revealed in everyday states of consciousness such as transiently being in states of boredom or flow. An increased awareness of the self is associated with an increased awareness of time when we are bored. In contrast, we lose track of time and the self when fully immersed in challenging activities accompanied by the feeling of enjoyment – experienced in the state of flow. The relation between self-awareness and time is even more prominently disclosed in anecdotal reports and empirical studies on altered states of consciousness such as in meditative states, in music-induced trance, and after ingestion of psychedelic substances. In peak states the exper...

Helena De Preester is assistant professor and researcher at University College Ghent, as well as a visiting research professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the University of Ghent. Her research focuses on the connection between the human mind, embodiment, technology, and wider society.  Manos Tsakiris is professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project . His research focuses on the link between body and self and how we become aware of ourselves and others. In this blog post they introduce their new co-edited, interdisciplinary volume on interoception. Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, hormonal and circulatory systems), and plays a unique role in ensuring homeostasis. Interoception therefore refers to the sensing of the state of the inner bod...

Today's post is by Clara Humpston. Clara is a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Not long ago I completed my PhD from Cardiff University and this paper was first written a couple of years ago when I was a PhD student there . My PhD research focused on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopted a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach by incorporating behavioural and phenomenological investigations. In my second post for Imperfect Cognitions, I summarise my most recent theoretical paper on the paradoxical nature of self-awareness in schizophrenia, published in Philosophical Psychology . The primary manifestations of schizophrenia in my opinion, are basic self-disturbances leading to the adoption of a solipsistic lifeworld that provides fertile ground for the development of psychotic phenomena such as first-rank symptoms. First-rank symptoms are often disruptions of one’s ego-boundary: that is,...

Today's post is by  Dr Pablo López-Silva , who is Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. He is the director of the 3-years FONDECYT Research Project titled 'The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought ' granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research of the Government of Chile.  Pablo López-Silva currently works on the philosophy of mind, clinical psychiatry, and psychopathology with a special focus on the way mental pathologies and empirical research inform our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Self-awareness i.e. the awareness we have of being the subject of our own experience is, perhaps, one of the most elusive elements of human mind. A common idea within current philosophy of mind is that the awareness we have of different external and internal experiences might necessarily involve a degree of self-awareness. In other words, every time you reach a cup, read a boo...

Today’s post is by Valerie Gray Hardcastle , Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinatti. I study the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences and have focused primarily on developing a philosophical framework for understanding consciousness that is responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric and psychological data. Currently, I am investigating the neuroscience of violence and its implications for both our understanding of human nature and the criminal justice system. I am also trying to figure out whether notions of embodied cognition help or hinder theorizing about consciousness. (I think that the answer will be neither.) Most recently, I have received research fellowships from the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Texas-Medical Branch ; the Centre for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution at theUniversity of Bochum ; and the Institute for Philosophy/S...

This post is by Chris Letheby . In recent decades there has been a growing interdisciplinary attempt to understand self-awareness by integrating empirical results from neuroscience and psychiatry with philosophical theorizing. This is exemplified by the enterprise known as ‘philosophical psychopathology’, in which observations about unusual cognitive conditions are used to infer conclusions about the functioning of the healthy mind. But this line of research has been somewhat limited by the fact that pathological alterations to self-awareness are unpredictable and can only be studied retrospectively—until now. The recent resurgence of scientific interest in ‘classic’, serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin has changed all this. Using more rigorous methods than some of their forebears, psychiatrists have shown that psychedelics can, after all, be given safely in clinical contexts, and may even cause lasting psychological benefits. Small studies have shown ...

In this post I interview Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen . VM: In an interesting study published in Qualitative Health Research you used a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of self, other, and the world in patients who had recently suffered a stroke and were experiencing hemispatial neglect. Could you say a bit more about the study, and expand on the idea that the findings show the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the process of rehabilitation? DZ : In that study we investigated first person accounts of neglect soon after a stroke. Many stroke patients experience hemispatial neglect, that is, they no longer notice the left side of their body and the perceptual field.  We interviewed 12 patients, using an open-ended format. When interviewing the patients, we were guided by phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity, and sought to explore the way these impairments affected the patients’ experiences....

In this post, Sam Wilkinson (below right) introduces a forthcoming Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, that he co-edited with psychologist Ben Alderson-Day (below left), on “Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis”. If we experience thoughts in our head, how can they seem to not be our own? To understand this, we need to explore what thoughts are and how we know them in the first place. In his paper (“Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-awareness”) Johannes Roessler outlines two views about knowledge of our own thoughts, attributed to Gilbert Ryle. The first is that we are “alive to” our own thoughts in the “serial process” of thinking, and the second is that we can “eavesdrop” on our inner speech, and interpret our own utterances in much the same was as we interpret the utterances of others. Roessler suggests that the former account is the one that is relevant for understanding thought insertion. In her paper (“On Thought Insertion”) Rachel Gunn questions the o...

Sahba Besharati I am currently in the 3rd year of my PhD undergoing a split-site collaboration project with the University of Cape Town and University College London. This post will focus on a recent publication featured in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation with my supervisor, Katerina Fotopoulou , and our collaborator in Italy, Valentina Moro , on a prototypical form of unawareness called anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). Neurological disturbances in awareness can offer an important avenue to explore the construction of the bodily self. AHP is one such example of a disorder of self-awareness, where patients have a lack of recognition or awareness of their motor paralysis following a stroke. AHP can have various clinical presentations, ranging from blatant denial of limb paralysis and associated delusional beliefs to emotional indifference of one’s motor disabilities. Although AHP is often transient (sometimes recovering within days or weeks), motor unawareness can significant...