Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Hayley Dewe , pictured above. She is a PhD student from the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Her research is based in The Selective Attention and Awareness laboratory , directed by Jason Braithwaite. Her research focuses on the neurocognitive correlates of anomalous (hallucinatory) experience, specifically pertaining to the ‘self’, embodiment, and consciousness. In this post I will briefly discuss the extraordinary phenomena of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and highlights key arguments raised in my recent paper, co-authored paper with Jason Braithwaite, which explores how findings from neuroscience can help debunk dualist notions of NDEs (Braithwaite & Dewe 2014 ; published in The (UK) Skeptic magazine ). NDEs are striking experiences that typically occur when one is close to death or exposed to life-threatening situations of intense physical and/or emotional danger (first coined by Moody 1975, Life after Life . New York: Bantam Books).

‘ 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 by Edoardo Zamuner (pictured above), a senior research fellow in the School of Psychology of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He previously held research and teaching positions at University College London, La Trobe University (Melbourne) and the University of Hong Kong. While he is a philosopher by training, he is a psychologist by trade and persuasion. His current research in psychology focuses on visual perception of faces and facial properties such as gender, expression and personality. His work in philosophy of mind concerns the emotions. Here he summarises his recent paper ‘ Emotions as Psychological Reactions ’, published in Mind and Language.  What kinds of mental states are emotions? My paper argues for the view that emotions are reactions to our experience and thoughts, broadly construed. But what exactly is a reaction? And why should we think of emotions as reactions? Talk of reactions is a reflection of everyday causal explanations, just as tal

Today Cass Sunstein  (in the picture above) talks about his book Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice . Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is now working on group decision-making and various projects on the idea of liberty. Choice is often an extraordinary benefit, but it can also be an immense burden. Time and attention are precious commodities, and we cannot focus on everything, even when our interests and our values are at stake. If we had to make choices about everything that affects us, we would be overwhelmed. We exercise our freedom, and we improve our welfare, by choosing not to choose. That choice opens up time and space for us, enabling us to focus on our real concerns. Establishing these claims, and identifying their limitations, are the purposes of this book. When you use a GPS, you are effectively asking it to choose a route for you; it provides a default route, which you can ignore if you like.

This post is by James Andow  (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading. James’s research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post he summarises his paper ‘ Expecting Moral Philosophers to be Reliable ’. You can read the paper in draft form here . Consider the following case: A bomb is about to go off. It’s a big one. If this bomb goes off, every single living thing will die instantaneously and painlessly, and the universe will be rendered incapable of ever supporting life again. There is but one way to stop the bomb: pushing a big red button. Pushing the button would stop the bomb from going off. Pushing the button would also cure all disease, eradicate poverty, remove the Tories from government, provide everyone with a free kitten, stop climate change, and bring Duke Ellington back. Is it morally permissible to push the button? If you thought of an answer, you j

In today's post John Read  (in the picture above) presents the recent book he co-authored with Jacqui Dillon , titled Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. My name is John Read. After 20 years working as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, mostly with people experiencing psychosis, I joined the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. There I published over 100 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g., child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis. I also research the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health. In February I moved to Melbourne and I now work at Swinburne University of Technology.  I am on the on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis and am the Editor of t

In this post PhD student Magdalena Antrobus (pictured above) summarises her recent research for Project PERFECT concerning the phenomenon known in the empirical literature as ‘depressive realism’. Depressive realism is the thesis that people with depression make more realistic inferences than ‘healthy’ individuals (Alloy and Abramson 1988).  The term refers to the phenomenon discovered in 1979 in a series of experiments designed around assessing the judgement of contingency tasks (Alloy and Abramson 1979) . The assessments of control made by participants with symptoms of depression were more accurate than those made by ‘healthy’ individuals. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant, making the results conclusive. People with depressive symptoms judged their control over uncontrollable events correctly, whilst the judgements made by individuals without depressive symptoms have been shown to exhibit a positive cognitive bias. Could people who expe

This post is by Anneli Jefferson, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project. On June 27th, Nils Kürbis and Dan Adams hosted a workshop on falsity entitled ' Falsity – Not just Truth’s Poor Relation ' at Birkbeck (see picture of venue above). The lively workshop approached falsity in a number of thought-provoking ways. Those of us who don’t work in metaphysics take the concept of falsity for granted. But once you start thinking about what falsity is, numerous puzzles arise. If you assert that something is false, in other words, it is not the case, what makes that claim true? When we speak truly, we say how things are. If we speak falsely, things aren’t how we say they are. But doesn’t that mean that what we say is there is not there at all? So what are we talking about? It seems as if we are talking about nothing at all, so how can what we said even make sense? One response to this problem is that there

The Mind, Value and Mental Health International Conference in Philosophy and Psychiatry took place on 25 July 2015 at the picturesque St. Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford. It attracted philosophers, psychiatrists and psychologists both from the UK and from abroad. Below I summarise four of the papers presented on that immensely fascinating day. The first talk was given by Rachel Cooper, Lancaster University (pictured below with Matthew Parrott) and was entitled ‘DSM-5: Stasis and Change’. Cooper argued that classifications like the DSM can be thought of as forming part of the infrastructure of science, and have much in common with material infrastructure. The implications are, Cooper suggested, are that as with material technologies it becomes possible for ‘path dependent’ development to cause a sub-optimal classification to get ‘locked in’ and hard to replace. Cooper argued that the DSM has become locked-in and as a consequence any changes to the diagnostic criteria have

After having studied relatively rare irrational beliefs, those that are also considered symptoms of psychiatric disorders and 'marks of madness', I have recently become interested in the irrationality of everyday beliefs and in particular in those beliefs and predictions that seem to betray excessive optimism. On 15th January 2015, I was asked to give a  talk  to the public at Modern Art Oxford, a gallery hosting at the time an exhibition called " Love is Enough ", with artwork by William Morris and Andy Warhol. The brief for the talk was to think about the creation of myths, something that interested both artists. I took the opportunity to examine the everyday myths that we all create when we think about our own character traits, talents, skills, and come to believe that we are better than average at everything. When we imagine what our future will be like, we see it as free of failure, drama and illness, and exemplifying a continuous progress, moving from asp