Imperfect Cognitions

This is the fifth and final post in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Glenn Carruthers (pictured above) summarises his paper ' Difficulties for Extending Wegner and Colleagues' Model of the Sense of Agency to Deficits in Delusions of Alien Control '. One of Christopher Frith's (e.g.  1992 ) ideas that has really taken hold is that part of the problem in delusions of alien control is a deficit in the sense of agency. Given that the sense of agency is the feeling that one controls one's actions we can see how a deficit in this feeling could lead to people saying things like: When I reach my hand for the comb it is my hand and arm which move, and my fingers pick up the pen, but I don’t control them… I sit there watching them move, and they are quite independent, what they do is nothing to do with me… I am just a puppet who is manipulated by cosmic strings. When the strings are pulled my body moves and I cannot p...

This week Emily T. Troscianko , Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities , and member of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Oxford, writes about anorexia for our series of accounts by experts-by-experience. Emily (pictured above) also contributes to Psychology Today with a blog called A Hunger Artist . If there’s any mental illness that offers the sufferer an illusion of having it all, it’s anorexia. The twin towers of that disingenuous promise are thinness and control, bedfellows familiar from pop psychology and the diet industry. No other mental illness gets under observers’ skins (incomprehension, fear, anger, envy) quite like anorexia, and that’s because none other is quite so physical. And it’s in the interplay between the mental and the physical that the hollowness of anorexia’s illusions gets exposed. In the early days, the heady ‘hunger high’ gets you hooked, the admiring comments about your weight loss keep ...

On 4th June I attended some talks at the  Valuing Health Conference  at University College London (see picture above), where the themes of Dan Hausman’s book,  Valuing Health  (Oxford University Press, 2015) were discussed. The event was organised by Jo Wolff and James Wilson. The intended audience was philosophers, economists, and also healthcare policy makers. The conference started with a brief overview of the arguments in the book, presented by Dan Hausman (University of Wisconsin) . There are two basic problems the book was meant to address: (1) we need to be able to compare health improvements brought by different policies; (2) we need to know what to do with the information (e.g., maximise health). Thus, the book provides answers to the following questions: How do we assign values to health states? How do we assess policies on the basis of those values? What role should people play in assigning values to policies? The discussion raises further questi...

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Garry Young summarises his paper ' Amending the Revisionist Model of the Capgras Delusion: A Further Argument for the Role of Patient Experience in Delusional Belief Formation '. I currently work as a senior lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, although my postgraduate studies were in philosophy. My research interests cover three distinct areas. First, I am interested in embodied cognition, particularly the relationship between consciousness and procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something, rather than knowledge of facts). I have argued, using cases of visual pathology (e.g. blindsight and visual agnosia), that a form of knowledge-how (knowing how to do something) can occur in the absence of conscious accompaniment.  I am also interested in the ethics underlying the virtual enactment of real-world taboos, such as murder or physical/sexual assault...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in sessions 2 and 3, emphasising those themes that have already been discussed in the blog. (If interested in session 1 of the conference, I reported on it last week). Session 2: Genetics, Neuroscience and Mental Disorder Neuroscientist  Pamela Sklar  asked "How may genetics change our understanding of mental illness?" and she focused on schizophrenia as a "mystery", that is a disorder that is both inherited and very common. Thousands of DNA alleles are involved in the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The difficulty in identifying the genetic bases of such disorders made some people think that research in this area was doomed to failure. But both for bipolar disorder and for schizophrenia some regions that increase risk have been discovered s...

This is our third of a series of posts in the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here  Rick Adams  summarises his paper (co-written with Harriet R. Brown and Karl J. Friston ) ' Bayesian Inference, Predictive Coding and Delusions '. I am in training to become a psychiatrist. I have also recently completed a PhD at UCL under Prof Karl Friston , a renowned computational neuroscientist. I am part of a new field known as Computational Psychiatry (CP). CP tries to explain how various phenomena in psychiatry could be understood in terms of brain computations (see also Corlett and Fletcher 2014 , Montague et al.,  2012 , and Adams et al. forthcoming in JNNP ). One phenomenon that ought to be amenable to a computational understanding is the formation of both ‘normal’ beliefs (i.e. beliefs which are generally agreed to be reasonable) and delusions. There are strong theoretical reasons to suppose that we (and other organisms) form beliefs in a Bayesi...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...

This is the second in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Kengo Miyazono summarises his paper (co-written with Lisa Bortolotti ) ' The Causal Role Argument Against Doxasticism About Delusions '. Doxasticism about delusion is the claim that delusions are beliefs. Delusions are usually regarded as beliefs in psychiatry. For instance, in the DSM-5 delusion is defined as a 'false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary' (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 819). Moreover, cognitive scientists working on theories of delusion formation assume that the mechanisms responsible for the formation of delusions are also the mechanisms responsible for the formation of beliefs ( Coltheart 2007 ; Corlett et al. 2010 ). However, doxasticism is not very...

In this post, Piers Benn presents his book entitled Commitment . Piers (pictured above) is a Visiting Lecturer at Heythrop College , University of London, and Adjunct Professor at Fordham University New York, based at its London Centre. He was a lecturer in philosophy and in medical ethics in previous posts. The title I chose for my book for the  Acumen Press  Art of Living series was Commitment (2011) but in many ways it could equally well have been Doubt . Thinking about it afresh after a few years away from it, I can see that it was largely a philosophical attempt to defend various forms of doubt, as a state forced upon us by judicious reasoning rather than desirable in itself. I focused on three main areas where the tension between commitment and doubt felt particularly powerful: love, work and faith. I wanted to uphold the value of commitment, but only when properly thought through. Commitment can be energising, morally improving and conducive to a deeply s...

Max Coltheart This is the first in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of AVANT on Delusions. Here  Max Coltheart  summarises his paper  ' From the Internal Lexicon to Delusional Belief '. Ten years ago, in an article on the two-factor theory of delusion, I wrote:  'Suppose that as we go about everyday life we use an internal model of the world (Gray  1995 ;  Sokolov  1963 ) to continuously predict what we will experience next. These predictions will normally be fulfilled, but occasionally not: occasionally something not predicted by the internal model occurs. That event indicates that there is something wrong with the database of beliefs that the model uses to predict what will happen next in the world. So the database needs to be fixed (by modifying e xisting beliefs or adopting new ones) so that it becomes compatible with the unexpected event' (Coltheart 2005 ). As I emphasize in my Avant  article, this is th...