Imperfect Cognitions

Eugenia Lancellotta is a PhD student in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Under the supervision of Lisa Bortolotti , she works on the adaptiveness of delusions, especially outside schizophrenia spectrum disorder. In this post, she discusses her paper “ Are clinical delusions adaptive ?” co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, that recently appeared in WIREs. In popular culture, and even in part of the scientific culture, delusions are still considered as the mark of madness. It would then seem to be counterintuitive to ask whether such bizarre, irrational and often harmful beliefs can be biologically or psychologically adaptive.  A trait or mechanism is considered to be biologically adaptive when it favours the reproductive success and survival of the organism it belongs to (Wakefield 1992). By analogy with biological adaptiveness, a trait is deemed to be psychologically adaptive when it delivers psychological benefits which support the wellbeing and ...

This is the second in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In a post published last week, and this post they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic innocence  (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry) .  Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT.  Our analysis depends on two distinct systems for instrumental learning, one goal-directed, the other habitual (Daw et al., 2005 ). The goal-directed system involves learning flexible relationships between actions and outcomes instantiated in the more...

This is the first in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In this post and the next they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic benefits (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry). Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT . The predictive coding model of mind and brain function and dysfunction seems to be committed to veracity; at its heart is an error correcting, plastic, learning mechanism that ought to maximize future rewards, and minimize future punishments like the agents of traditional microec...