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...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by  Anastasia Christakou  and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and co...

Today's post is by project  PERFECT Doctoral Researcher Valeria N. Motta 2018 is my second year as a doctoral researcher on project PERFECT . During my first year, I’ve been investigating loneliness and solitude. For that I did research on existing literature from different philosophical traditions and on the outcomes of empirical research. The existing literature on loneliness has focused on identifying its characteristics and has utilised different approaches. The idea behind finding common features (such as boredom or passivity) is that if we are able to identify them, a specific treatment can be developed in order to alleviate the problem. But documented in the literature I have also found an array of different ways of experiencing loneliness (such as those that emerge from failure to remember traumatic events, or which are masqueraded as connectedness via social media). These cases require a more fine grained approach. I have the privilege to get the support and mult...

My research focuses on epistemic and pragmatic benefits of depression. More specifically I investigate whether experiences related to depressive illness such as low mood, negativity bias or delusions might have implicit or explicit beneficial outcomes for the subject. It is widespread news that depression constitutes a modern epidemic. It relates to individual suffering, distorts one’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes, and sometimes leads to suicide. However, the results of more recent psychological studies indicate that the experience of depression might be linked to particular benefits for the subject as well as to pain and despair. I spent my first two years on PERFECT researching epistemic and psychological benefits of low mood and depressive delusions. Low mood occurring in mild and moderate forms of depression is linked to more accurate judgements about the self and self-related circumstances. In the view of trade-off accounts this means that the epistemic b...

Today's post is by Liz Atkin (pictured below) who is an artist and advocate for Compulsive Skin Picking . To learn more about Liz and what she does, you can access her YouTube channel , listen to her being interviewed by Ted Meyer in 2015 , or read this detailed feature in Like-Minded . The post is illustrated with some of Liz's beautiful artworks. Anxiety is now sited as one of the most common of mental illnesses but some anxiety disorders, Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours such as Compulsive Skin Picking (CSP or Dermatillomania) and Hair-pulling (Trichotillomania) are seldom recognised and treatment is very hard to access. They are much more common than initially thought and among the most poorly understood, misdiagnosed, and undertreated groups of disorders. BFRBs may affect as many as 1 out of 20 people. Compulsive Skin Picking is a complex physical and mental disorder that often develops in young childhood. It provides comfort, pleasure or emotional releas...

I start the second year of my PhD on Project  PERFECT with curiosity and enthusiasm. My plans for this year are largely focused on the continuation of my on-going research on the epistemic and pragmatic benefits of affective disorders, including depression, dysthymia, and bipolar disorder. I spent my first year with PERFECT investigating the phenomenon of depressive realism. The question which I attempted to address relates to the ‘sadder but wiser’ dilemma: are those, who suffer from depression, ‘wiser’ in any way than healthy people? The answer appears to be more complex than I initially expected: certain symptoms associated with light depression (e.g. low mood) contribute to more accurate beliefs with regards to the self and self-related circumstances, but not in other contexts. My findings have been published in an  article which I co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti and were presented at The British Society for the Philosophy of Science 2015 annual conference an...

‘ Dementia and Imagination ’ is a project aimed at investigating how art can improve the life of people with dementia and their carers. To know more about the project, I interviewed Dr Victoria Tischler (in the picture below) who is one of the lead investigators. Victoria's research interests span social psychology theory, adolescent and maternal mental health, medical education, and creativity and mental illness. She facilitates creative activities in mental health settings and is a public engagement ambassador for the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). LB: What interests you about the Dementia and Imagination project?  VT: It is an opportunity to thoroughly interrogate the potential for both the therapeutic use of art with people who have dementia, and to explore public engagement with the condition through creative products and processes. We have a large multidisciplinary project team so there are lots of opportunities to develop ...

This post is part of our series of monthly posts by experts-by-experience. This month, Bipolar Whispers tells us about the importance of writing. This is how she introduces herself: "33 year old Mental Health blogger who is married to the love of her life and together they have 3 wonderful children and 2 fur babies. She has Bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, and Anxiety. Lover of butterflies. Survivor." They say that many people with Bipolar Disorder are creative. I always wondered if this were true. Within myself I could never see my creativity. I could not play music, I was not crafty. In retrospect I can see my creative outlet has always been writing. My love and knack for writing began around the time I experienced my first true mania, although I never knew it was mania at the time. Retrospect is a very powerful thing. I never knew I could write, or rather, I never knew I wrote well. I went to appointment after appointment with my psychiatrist or my psychologist for...

In this post Roberta Payne writes about the relationship between schizophrenia and art. Roberta earned a BA in classics from Stanford, an MA in Italian from UCLA, an MA in romance languages from Harvard, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Denver. She taught English, Latin, and Italian, and her published work includes literary translations from Italian, short stories, and articles on schizophrenia. In 2013 Roberta published a memoir,  Speaking to My Madness: How I Searched for Myself in Schizophrenia . Her article "My Outsider Art" has recently been published in the  Schizophrenia Bulletin , and is available open access. Although I’ve done art since I was a small child and studied art history formally in college, I didn’t find my artistic niche until I developed mental illness in my early 20s. Then I began a long love affair with what has been dubbed “outsider art,” the art of people variously marginalized in society, to distinguish it fro...

Magdalena Antrobus My research focuses on epistemic and pragmatic benefits of imperfect cognitions found in the clinical population. More specifically I am interested in acquiring answers related to the question of the possible positive sides of mental disorders. It is commonly known that mental illness constitutes a source of profound harm. It relates to individual suffering, distorts one’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes, and sometimes leads to severe impairment. However, the results of more recent psychological studies indicate that psychiatric disorders might be linked to particular benefits as well as causing pain. There has been a well-researched relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity. It is believed that certain clinical symptoms brought by the illness, for example thought speed or openness for new experiences, may contribute to enhanced creativity (see for instance Ghaemi, 2011 ; Andreasen, 2005 ; Jamison, 1996 ). (For more details see my ...

Greg Currie Is there any significant link between mental disorders and creativity? As part of my research, I interviewed Greg Currie , Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. Greg’s research focuses on the arts and cognition. His latest essay, entitled “Creativity and the Insight that Literature Brings”, appeared in the edited volume The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). MA : How would you define creativity? GC : I wouldn’t attempt a watertight definition but I think of creativity as the capacity to find good, unpredictable solutions to problems. Without the first clause about good solutions we simply have wildly unconventional behaviour which does not succeed, and I think a tendency to success is part of what it takes to be creative. The point about unpredictability highlights a point I would want to make about creativity being an epistemic notion: we judge certain behaviours as creative but other beings, knowing more about th...

Positive illusions provide a challenge to the once-accepted view that accurate beliefs about oneself and the world are conducive to wellbeing and mental health. Illusions are "beliefs that depart from reality" and they are positive when they involve unrealistic optimism about one's capacities, prospects, or control over the external environment.  We can find three broad types of positive illusions, following Taylor and Brown (1994) : (1) excessively positive self-appraisals; (2) the belief that one has greater control over events than it is actually the case; (3) more rosy views of the future than statistics can warrant. It is important that positive illusions are regarded as  mild distortions of reality and do not involve "denying the obvious": most researchers interested in positive illusions are keen to distinguish positive illusions from cases of self-deception or from defence mechanisms. Taylor and Brown have shown not only that positive illusions are...

Reece Roberts, Aleea Devitt, Donna Rose Addis  We’re a group of researchers in the Memory Lab at The University of Auckland. Our research interests are broad, ranging from autobiographical memory to false memory to imagination and creativity, and we approach these topics from both cognitive and neural perspectives. But the strand that threads all this research together is the constructive nature of memory. It is well established that episodic memory is a constructive process. Seminal work from Bartlett (1932) demonstrated the fallibility of memory, and also highlighted the ways in which it can be distorted. Building on this earlier work on false memory, Schacter and colleagues proposed a framework for the cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory in the early 1990s that has proved influential. Since that time, advances in neuroimaging have provided evidence to support three key ideas: (1) that features or elemental parts comprising an episode must be linked t...

Magdalena Antrobus I am a Masters student in Philosophy of Health and Happiness at the University of Birmingham. I also hold a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology and have over 5 years experience in clinical practice, working mainly with psychosis, depression, eating disorders and manic - depressive illness in conjunction with addictions (so-called dual diagnosis).  In my recent work I examined possible beneficial traits of manic-depressive illness (Bipolar Disorder). At first glance it may sound surprising to place ‘bipolar’ and ‘positive’ in the same sentence. However, a thorough study and analyses conducted by some psychiatrists ( Galvez, Thommi, Ghaemi, 2011 , Ghaemi 2012a , Ghaemi, 2012b ) discovered that having the illness might enhance particular characteristics that are seen as beneficial. The authors of one of the studies reviewed 81 examples that mentioned positive psychological qualities in individuals diagnosed with manic depressive illness and found a strong ...