Imperfect Cognitions

As announced , project PERFECT organised and co-hosted two public engagement events as part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Both celebrated the role of imagination and the importance of relationships in growing and healing. Here I report on how they went! Red Hands Film Screening A scene from Red Hands Director and screenwriter Francesco Filippi presented his short film in 2D and stop animation, Mani Rosse (Red Hands) , to an engaged and diverse audience at the Midlands Arts Centre on 18th June. The film has been honoured with awards at film festivals worldwide and sparked lots of interest. The screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring experts in youth mental health and experts with lived experience of domestic violence, one of the themes of the film. Panel discussion: Lucy Some of the audience's comments and questions were about how the film was made, what it was inspired by, and what some specific sce...

On 12 March 2018 the project PERFECT team hosted an event for the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham, entitled: Start, Stop, Pause: Keeping Mood on Track , with the aim of sharing information about bipolar disorder, and the psychological interventions that have proved successful in improving people's quality of life and avoiding their relapse. The session was led by Lizzie Newton who works as a clinical psychologist on the Mood on Track programme and an expert by experience describing how bipolar disorder impacted on his life, and what his involvement was with the programme. Their joint presentation included information about what bipolar is, about how a diagnosis is made and people can get help, about the Mood on Track programme, and about what we can all do to support people who may be experiencing changes in mood. The session ended with some questions and comments from the audience. Bipolar disorder presents as a pattern of changes in ho...

Each year, the University of Birmingham hosts the Arts &Science Festival , a week-long celebration of research, culture and collaboration across campus and beyond. During the festival, those involved in different aspects of university life deliver a programme of concerts, exhibitions, screenings, talks and workshops around a common theme. This year’s theme “Land and Water” had us at project PERFECT thinking about perceptions of climate change, and in the following, I report on a lunchtime event that we hosted on this topic, in which we were joined by Ulrike Hahn (Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Birkbeck, below) and Anna Bright (‎Chief Executive at Sustainability West Midlands). Why should those researching imperfect cognitions be interested in perceptions of climate change? Well, it turns out that the former frequently feature in, and shape, the latter. We see lots of things, beyond the consideration of climactic data, influence whether people beli...

The third year of our ERC-funded project PERFECT (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done in the last year, and make plans for the future. What we have done in our second year The PERFECT team delivered many academic and outreach talks in the UK and internationally, wrote papers, and organised a series of interdisciplinary events sponsored by the project, including a mini-workshop on Belief and Emotion in November 2015, a public engagement event called Tricked by Memory  for the Arts and Science Festival in March 2016, and a symposium entitled Explaining Delusions at the International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama in July 2016. The main event was our first project workshop, PERFECT 2016, on False but Useful Beliefs , in February 2016. We had several papers accepted which will be published open access, including Ema's " Malfunction Defended " in Synthese;  a chapter on what makes beliefs delusional by Rachel G...

The 2016 edition of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham , whose theme was memory and forgetting, took place between 14th and 20th March.  The festival showcased research and collaboration at the University through talks, exhibitions, performances, workshops and screenings. Project  PERFECT and the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project hosted a lunchtime event open to the public, Tricked by Memory, organised and chaired by Lisa Bortolotti.  The talk by Magdalena Antrobus (pictured below) was entitled: "Sometimes I get lucky and forget. Depression, memory and negativity bias". First, she explored the relation between depression and the way we remember things. Magdalena discussed the phenomenon of depressive realism and asked whether suffering from low mood may enhance the accuracy of our memories. Second, she presented evidence suggesting that in severe forms of depression people remember their past in an overly negative way: they concen...

On 16th March I chaired a session entitled " Sight, Sound, and Mental Health " for the Arts & Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Thanks to project PERFECT sponsoring the event, we could have three exciting talks, one by Sam Wilkinson on verbal hallucinations, one by Amy Hardy on imagery, and one by Ema Sullivan-Bissett on alien abduction belief, followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Sam talked about the difficulties in defining verbal hallucinations, as some have an auditory quality to them, but others appear to be more like thoughts. The wide variety of verbal hallucinations makes it harder to arrive at a unifying theory of what causes them. Drawing from his work with the Hearing the Voice project, Sam illustrated with examples and case studies how hallucinations can play a significant role in either hindering or supporting the wellbeing of voice hearers.  Amy Hardy Amy explained the importance of imagery in everyday life and ...