Imperfect Cognitions

Here is an interview with  Andreas Elpidorou  (University of Louisville) whose book  Propelled! How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Can Lead Us to the Good Life  will be out with Oxford University Press in early 2020. The book focuses on the role of negative emotions and states of discontent in our lives and argues for the counterintuitive claim that boredom, frustration, and anticipation are good for us. LB: To start, how did you become interested in boredom? Are you one of those people who have a propensity to experience boredom frequently? AE: Boredom has been on my mind for years. Although I don’t score high on measures of boredom proneness, I am no stranger to boredom. I experienced its full force almost two decades ago (it’s hard to believe that it’s been so long!) during a phase in my life that seemed to be – while it was unfolding – endless: my mandatory military service. What I remember most vividly from the time that I spent in various ca...

In this post, Phil Corlett replies to Ryan McKay 's summary of his paper " Measles, Magic and Misidentifications: A Defence of the Two-Factor Theory of Delusions ", itself a response to Phil's earlier post on his paper " Factor one, familiarity and frontal cortex: a challenge to the two-factor theory of delusions ". See also Amanda Barnier 's important commentary on the debate, and Phil's reply . Got all that? Right, on with the post! I am grateful to Ryan for his careful and collegial rebuttal of my critique. I am grateful too for the opportunity to respond. Ryan’s response does mollify some of my points. However, I am sure no one will be surprised that I have not updated my beliefs about 2-factor theory. First, Ryan suggests that 2-factor theorists knew about the breadth of the deficits of vmPFC cases, since they were described in Langdon and Coltheart’s ( 2000 ) paper. They were indeed described. Why then, 19 years (and hundreds...

We often say things like “you shouldn’t believe that the Earth is flat” or “just look at the evidence, you really ought to believe that vaccinations save lives”. Just as one might think that we have particular obligations to behavemorally, one might suspect that this sort of talk reveals that we have obligations to believeparticular things, or perhaps, to believe in a particular way. Is that right? And if so, what do those obligations consist in? On 30th – 31st May, a workshop investigating issues related to these questions was held at St. Thomas University , Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Organised by Scott Stapleford , Professor of Philosophy at St Thomas University, and Kevin McCain , Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the workshop comprised eight talks over the course of two days. Here, I summarize just a few of them. Sharon Ryan was interested in the question of whether we have an epistemic obligation to be open-minded. She ...

This post is by Philip Corlett who is currently engaging in a debate with Ryan McKay on this blog about the two-factor theory of delusions (see Phil's and Ryan's previous posts). Here Phil replies to Amanda Barnier's comment . I am grateful to Amanda for her contributions, to the blog exchange and to the literature on delusions. I am of course aware of her hypnosis work – having spent time at Macquarie and even been hypnotized (I am highly hypnotizable, which is perhaps too much to share here). My article and post were provocative and perhaps too confrontational. Having spent time at the Belief Formation Program Table, I understand how exciting and generative it can be. My word choice was perhaps a little too strong. 'Adherents' may have been better. I see that 'acolytes' may be particularly insulting to practicing scientists. My article was about the basic foundational data and arguments of two-factor theory. Whilst Amanda is right to criti...

This post is by Amanda Barnier , Professor of Cognitive Science and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Macquarie University . She was Deputy Leader of the Belief Formation Program and Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders from 2011-2018. In her work she has attempted to use hypnotic methods to recreate clinical delusions in the laboratory. Here she contributes to the exchange between Phil Corlett and Ryan McKay on the two-factor theory of delusions. I read Phil Corlett ’s and Ryan McKay ’s blog posts with great interest as well as their original article and commentary . As someone who has worked in the field of delusions (albeit on a bit of a hypnotic tangent) for about 15 years (including for 12 years since I arrived at Macquarie University in 2007 to work with Max Coltheart), I wanted to share some insights. In his original published article in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Phi...

I'm Ryan McKay , Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London , and head of the Royal Holloway Morality and Beliefs Lab (MaB-Lab) . I'm interested in how we form and revise beliefs, including delusional beliefs. This post is a summary of my article “Measles, Magic and Misidentifications: A Defence of the Two-Factor Theory of Delusions” in reply to Phil Cortlett's recent paper discussed on the blog last week . The Two-Factor Theory of Delusions One may (a) interpret data falsely, but also (b) receive false data for interpretation. ~ Southard, 1912 , p. 328. The idea that delusions arise when individuals attempt to interpret “false data” has been incorporated in several theories of delusions. Two-factor theorists, however (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2011; Davies & Coltheart, 2000 ; Langdon & Coltheart, 2000 ), view deluded individuals both as “receiving false data for interpretation” (factor one, which furnishes the content of the del...

Today's post is by Dr Ahmed Samei Huda, a Consultant Psychiatrist working mostly in Early Intervention in Psychosis for Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust. He is introducing his book, The Medical Model in Mental Health: An Explanation and Evaluation (OUP, 2019). Huda is on Twitter (@SameiHuda), and blogs here . I am a clinician not an academic who became increasingly frustrated with the strawman depictions of psychiatry in the fraught conflicts between different professions and ideologies in mental health. So I decided to read more about what the medical model was and the more I read the more he realised there was an absence of a book explaining from first principles what the medical model was and how it was applied in mental health.  I’m not a world class expert but my over 20 years experience of clinical practice combined with extensive reading including several volumes of the excellent International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry series and David...

In this post,  Phil Corlett , Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, discusses some of the ideas in his  paper  ‘Factor one, familiarity and frontal cortex: a challenge to the two-factor theory of delusions’ recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Over recent years, Imperfect Cognitions has become the premier hub and outlet for work on the neurobiology and cognitive psychology of delusions. It has featured my work on aberrant prediction error and delusions in schizophrenia (Corlett et al., 2007 ), and work that conceptually replicates it (Kaplan et al., 2016 ). There has been work, also highlighted on the blog, from neurological patients that suggest instead that a 2-factor explanation of delusions may be more appropriate (Darby et al., 2017 ), although that work was not conclusive (McKay and Furl, 2017 ). It has all garnered much interest. Partly because delusions inherently fascinating, I think, and partly becaus...

In today's post we announce two events celebrating the work of project PERFECT, both to be held later this month. Both events are part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. PERFECT hosted three academic workshops, one on belief in 2016, one on memory in 2017, and one on confabulation in 2018. In 2019 we want to see whether some core themes of the project can be conveyed to a wider public via the means of artistic expression. We have planned the screening of a film, Mani Rosse (Red Hands) by Francesco Filippi ; and an art exhibition entitled Pouring Water Through a Telescope in collaboration with the Art Recovery Group at the Barber Institute . Both events celebrate the role of imagination in promoting growth and healing. Both events explore the importance of personal relationships in wellbeing and success. RED HANDS  Film screening Where: Midlands Arts Centre , Birmingham  When: 18th June, doors open at 6pm. For whom: All ...

In which I confabulate (in a sense I’ll leave up to the reader to determine) about my recent paper “ Confabulation, Explanation, and the Pursuit of Resonant Meaning ”. This is the final post in our series dedicated to our special issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” in Topoi, so let me take the opportunity to thank all of the authors for contributing to what I think has turned out to be a fantastic resource on current philosophical and psychological thinking on the topic. You can revisit the other posts in the the series  (and find links to the full papers)  here . I don’t really understand ball sports. I mean that in the sense that, if I’m ever a spectator to a bunch of people throwing/kicking/hitting an inflated spherical object around a pitch, I’m usually not familiar with the rules, and I just don’t get a lot of what’s going on, and end up losing interest. But I also mean it in the sense that I am just not stirred up by a lot of the grandiose spor...