Imperfect Cognitions

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 ...

This post is by Mark Rowlands (pictured below) who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. He has written eighteen books, and a hundred or so journal papers, book chapters and reviews. His most recent book is Memory and the Self: Phenomenology,Science, and Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press). Intuitively, it is not unreasonable to suppose that our episodic memories play a significant – but not necessarily exhaustive – role in making us who we are. After all, what could make us the people we are if not the episodes we have encountered on these tracks through space and time that we call lives? And how could these things we have encountered be retained, and so play a role in shaping us, if not through episodic memory? As an intuition this is amenable to several quite different theoretical articulations. Perhaps the most familiar to analytic philosophers is what I refer to as the metaphysical project . This project is made up of several, related,...

My name is Misia Temler and I am a forensic psychologist and a PhD candidate in Cognitive Science supervised by Professor Amanda Barnier , Professor John Sutton , and Associate Professor Doris McIlwain at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . My PhD research investigates how our memory of recent personal events changes over subsequent retellings. Misia Temler Take a moment to remember your 21st birthday or other milestone birthday, or first date with your current partner. These events are often remembered quite vividly in detail as they are typically emotional, salient, and have frequently been retold on numerous occasions. Would it surprise you that some of these seemingly vivid details can change in just a week when you retell your event? Perhaps on your first date your partner wore a red shirt and not a blue shirt, or maybe that first date actually took place at noon and not in the evening. Did you feel happy and excited or did you...

This conference in Durham was designed to bring together different disciplines across the humanities with specific emphasis on those whose work relates to, informs, or is informed by aspects of the cognitive, brain and behavioural sciences. Cognitive Futures is an international, interdisciplinary research network supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2012-14. As well as the main speakers and some general sessions there were five themed sessions: Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice The Extended Mind Theatre and Performance Storyworlds and Fictionality Brains, Culture and Mental Pathology