Imperfect Cognitions

On 12 March 2018 the project PERFECT team hosted an event for the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham, entitled: Start, Stop, Pause: Keeping Mood on Track , with the aim of sharing information about bipolar disorder, and the psychological interventions that have proved successful in improving people's quality of life and avoiding their relapse. The session was led by Lizzie Newton who works as a clinical psychologist on the Mood on Track programme and an expert by experience describing how bipolar disorder impacted on his life, and what his involvement was with the programme. Their joint presentation included information about what bipolar is, about how a diagnosis is made and people can get help, about the Mood on Track programme, and about what we can all do to support people who may be experiencing changes in mood. The session ended with some questions and comments from the audience. Bipolar disorder presents as a pattern of changes in ho...

Today's post is by  Peter Clutton is a graduate student at the Australian National University School of Philosophy (previously at Macquarie University) working on the nature and taxonomy of delusions. In my recent article, " A new defence of doxasticism about delusions: The cognitive phenomenological defence ", I enter the ongoing debate over whether delusions are beliefs (or whether they are some other, non-doxastic state). I argue that delusions are beliefs, despite the many objections to that view. It might seem obvious that delusions are beliefs. People with delusions typically insist they believe what they say, and the fact that they do is often the very reason they come to clinical attention in the first place. Indeed, clinical manuals like the DSM define “delusion” as a type of “false belief”. On the other hand, delusions seem to defy many preconceptions about the nature of belief. For example, we expect people to act on their beliefs, but people with ...

This post is by Thomas Mulligan , a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics . He talks about his new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State . A striking feature of the philosophical debate about justice is that our most popular theories are rejected by the people who would have to live under them.   Since the 1970s, libertarianism and egalitarianism have dominated political philosophy despite being unpalatable to the public; we know, for example, that “empirical studies provide almost no support for egalitarianism, understood as equality of outcomes, or for Rawls’s difference principle” ( Konow 2003 : 1199). The goal of this book is to provide a theory of justice that is consonant with human intuition and more conceptually compelling than these competitors on the right and the left.  Although you wouldn’t know it from our politics, there is deep normative agreement about the structure of a just economy.  Human beings ...

In this post I introduce a paper I wrote with Ema Sullivan-Bissett on the epistemic benefits of clinical memory distortions, which recently appeared open access in Mind and Language . It is one of the core outputs of two recent projects, the AHRC-funded Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions and the ERC-funded project PERFECT . The key message in the paper has received some coverage in the press ( Medicalxpress , India Blooms , Laboratory Equipment,  and Health Canal ).  In Keeping Mum , Marianne Talbot describes how her mother was a great storyteller before she had dementia. One of her best stories was how one day, when she was 14, she was late for school because her mother had just given birth to twins. The headmistress did not believe that that was the reason for being late and punished her, which she felt was a great injustice. When dementia advanced, the story about the twins’ birth ended up being merged with other stories (for instance, other sto...

This post is by Robert Nash . Robert A. Nash is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Aston University , and a recent presenter at TEDxBrum. Much of his research is focused on biases and distortions of memory, and their implications in various real-life contexts. In this post, he talks about his recent edited book (with James Ost, University of Portsmouth), entitled False and Distorted Memories. Psychologists have been writing about and studying the reconstructive properties of memory for more than a century. Nowadays, hundreds of scientific papers are published every year that further propel our understanding of how people use memory to reconstruct the past. So why, despite all of these decades of studies, do so many of the general public still subscribe to the idea that remembering is infallible, like the re-playing of a video recording? Why hasn’t all this scientific research had a much more tangible influence on what people believe about memory? In our recent edited boo...

Today's post is provided by Project PERFECT 's Co-investigator Michael Larkin from Aston University. In the post he outlines his plans for the coming months of the project. We’ve had a good start to this final block already, with Rachel Gunn and Magdalena Antrobus both successfully defending their theses at viva before Christmas, and subsequently being awarded their doctorates. I’ve really enjoyed working with Lisa Bortolotti and these two brilliant, creative and insightful researchers. It has been really exciting to see the interdisciplinary nature of their work take on such a distinctive character: I hope that we will see the the benefits of this in future work, post-PERFECT, too.  In Magdalena’s work, the interdisciplinary quality has taken the form of a very rigorous engagement with existing psychological evidence about the nature and context of low mood. In Rachel’s thesis, it involved conducting interviews, and engaging with phenomenological data, about th...

This post is by Tulio Giraldi . Tulio Giraldi is a researcher and teacher of pharmacology and clinical psychology at the University of Trieste, currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health & Social Science at the King’s College London.  The topics of his basic and clinical research have been cancer chemotherapy, together with the pharmacology of the central nervous system and the responses to stress. More recently, he has been researching the role of genetic polymorphisms in mental health, and the pharmacogenetics of the response of psychiatric drugs. In this post he talks about his book Unhappiness, Sadness and Depression . According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an epidemic of depression is spreading around the world, expected to become by 2020 the second leading cause of world disability and by 2030 to be the largest contributor to disease burden. The serious concern for depression and antidepressant drugs led me to analyze all the a...

Today’s post is provided by Jorge Gonçalves of IFILNOVA , Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) and the Lisbon Mind & Reasoning Group (group included in IFILNOVA). In this post he provides a summary of his chapter "Why are delusions pathological?" in Hipólito, I., Gonçalves, J. Pereira, J. G.  Schizophrenia and Common Sense: explaining the relation between madness and social values . The aim of the article is to identify a characteristic of delusions: that which makes them pathological. This aim may appear a bit strange at first because one believes that delusions just are a pathological alteration of the mind. However, some authors have shown that although pathological delusions are the most studied, not all delusions have necessarily harmful consequences for the delirious subject or for others. Hence, it seems pertinent to question what makes delusions a pathological state. “Pathological” is here understood as that which damages the subject (not that which d...