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...

On 16th and 17th of April, the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham held a two day conference on the Neurocognition of Aberrant Experience and Belief to celebrate the launch of the Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme . The conference was organized by Jason Braithwaite and Hayley Dewe , and featured nineteen talks across two days by researchers from different disciplines interested in aberrant experience and belief. In this post I will report on just a handful of these talks (see delegates' reactions by heading over to Twitter with #AEBConference ). In his talk ‘Things that Make you go Weird’, Roger Newport reported on findings using the MIRAGE  machine, which he demonstrated over lunch on the first day. I was lucky enough to have a go and experienced the illusion of an elongated index finger and a missing right hand! Newport suggested that not having these so-called ‘aberrant’ experiences is abnormal, and that future research might look t...

Vince Polito I’m Vince Polito , a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. My area of research is sense of agency, that is the sense of control that each of us feels over our own self-generated actions. This is normally an unremarkable sense – right now I am intending to type this post and so my fingers move to press each key in turn and I have a sense of agency for the movements. There are situations, however, where our normal sense of agency is disrupted. Perhaps the most striking example is alien control delusions. Patients with these delusions report that particular body movements are controlled by some external entity (Spence, 2001) . A reduced sense of agency is also a defining characteristic of hypnotic responding. Individuals who are highly hypnotisable will often report that actions they make in response to hypnotic suggestions occur without their conscious intention. Hypnosis provides a marvellous opportunity to study sense of agency alteratio...

 Chris Letheby Greetings! I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Adelaide , Australia, writing a thesis on philosophical issues concerning scientific research into psychedelic drugs. This research raises questions in bioethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of self, naturalised epistemology, and philosophy of cognitive science. In this post I propose that some psychedelic states are epistemically innocent imperfect cognitions. I have omitted citations for stylistic reasons but will gladly supply them on request. Psychedelic (or 'hallucinogenic') drugs are once again being studied as psychotherapeutic and transformative agents, and results thus far are intriguing. There is evidence that a single administration of a psychedelic can yield durable improvement in symptoms of such conditions as obsessive compulsive disorder, treatment-resistant depression, addiction, and anxiety associated with terminal illness. Moreover, psychedelic experien...