Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck, co-written with her fellow authors, in which they address their latest article, For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology , published in Psychopathology on July 28, 2025.  Helene Cæcilie Mørck   Helene Cæcilie Mørck  I draw on my twenty years as a choreographer, as well as my lifelong lived experience with altered states related to schizophrenia. During several hospitalizations for psychosis, I found that my training and embodied knowledge as a dancer and choreographer provided me with methods to navigate the emotional chaos I was experiencing.  I developed an inner choreographic map, using my embodied knowledge to structure the emotional turmoil and altered states I experienced. In close collaboration with Giovanni and Veronica, we have been translating this knowledge and deconstructing the language of dance and choreography into practical tools that potentially could be used to test the Chore...

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology formed in 2017, with the aim to “promote interaction in Australasia among philosophers and psychologists, broadly construed to include anyone interested in scientific study of the mind”. The ASPP held their inaugural conference at Macquarie University in December 2018, and I was lucky enough to go along. Here’s a little of what I learned there... If you’ve ever been perplexed by the prevalence of a viewpoint or political stance that you don’t share, then you might be wondering: how do we step outside of the epistemic echo chambers in which we find ourselves in our increasingly online world? Kate Devitt and her team at Queensland University of Technology are on the case.  Inspired by the finding that increasing the number and diversity of hypotheses considered can improve decision making, particularly in an organisational and strategic setting, Kate and her team have built an interactive platform which encourag...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate (University of Birmingham), reporting from an event taking place in London at the Institute of Philosophy on 26th May 2017, entitled " The Distributed Cognitive Ecologies of Collaborative Embodied Skill " . Philosophers, psychologists, and others share an interest in how human beings act in the world. In particular, scholars are fascinated by how humans develop and then intelligently deploy complex suites of skills and abilities, successfully engaging with an equally complex and rapidly changing environment. Even more impressively, humans often coordinate their actions with others – synchronising with and complementing the actions of their peers in collaborative endeavours as varied as football games and musical performances. This workshop, organised by John Sutton of Macquarie University , was focused around the investigation of this fascinating topic, with particular emphasis on ways in which our complex, structured, material an...