Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Stephen Gadsby . Stephen is a Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) postdoctoral fellow, based at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology , Antwerp University. His research employs theoretical and empirical methods to explore a broad range of topics within philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. These include eating disorders, delusions, self-deception, imposter syndrome, and body representation. Stephen Gadsby Sufferers of anorexia and bulimia often believe that their bodies are larger than reality. This appears undeniably irrational. Given that their bodies are not as large as they claim, such beliefs appear untethered to evidence. In my recent paper , I suggest that those who suffer from these disorders are not as irrational as they appear. The first clue comes from first-person reports. These individuals often report experiencing changes in the physical size of their body, as if their stomach and legs were extended, expanding, or blown-up. Taking these repor...

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from How the Light Gets in Festival 2015. How the Light Gets in is a philosophy and music festival which takes place annually at Hay-on-Wye. This May was the seventh festival with over 650 philosophy, comedy and music events over a 9 day period. On the 24th May I attended a workshop run by Richard Bentall  (pictured above) about hallucinations – in particular AVHs (auditory verbal hallucinations) also known as ‘voice hearing’. In this workshop Bentall gave us a ‘whistle stop tour’ of the research and literature on ‘voice hearing’. He drew on his own research and the research of others on signal detection analysis (eg: Bentall & Slade, 1985 ; Badcock et. al.,2013 ), the research of Chris Frith and others (eg Frith, 1987 ; Ford & Mathalon, 2005 ) on the neuroscience behind the experience and on research from Marius Romme who has investigated aspects such as history, background and onset (including childhood trauma) to understand...

During Eating Disorders Awareness Week , we take the opportunity to list some useful resources for people who want to know more about what it is like to live with an eating disorder and what can be done to help. B-eat , the UK charity for eating disorders, has organised an event for tomorrow, called " Sock it to Eating Disorders ": you can wear silly socks for a day! B-eat has also just released a report of the costs of eating disorders to the UK economy, which you can read about and download here . The Mental Health Foundation website and the website of Mind, the mental health charity, are a good source of information about eating disorders in general. The MHF features  the story of Casey  that illustrates the difficulties of people facing eating disorders in receiving adequate support. Mind features the story of Hope , who writes about her time in an adolescent psychiatric unit. There are several blogs dealing with eating disorders from different perspectives ...

Jason Braithwaite I am posting this on behalf of Jason Braithwaite , Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and head of the Selective Attention and Awareness Laboratory (SAAL), and Hayley Dewe , PhD student in the SAAL, in the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Hayley Dewe Using modern methods of neuroscience and psychology, we both research the neurocognition of aberrant and anomalous experiences, including (though not restricted to), the out-of-body experience, dissociation, disorders of embodiment, disembodiment, signs of depersonalization / derealization, aberrant emotional salience in hallucinatory experience, cortical hyperexcitability, and multisensory integration, etc. The rubber-hand illusion (RHI) involves experimentally inducing an anomalous body experience in observers ( Botvinick & Cohen, 1998 ). Typically observers report everything from mild sensations such as their real hand getting cold, to more striking experiences whe...