Imperfect Cognitions

In this post Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from the Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy held on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of November 2015. The lectures were delivered by Professor Steven E. Hyman , former director of the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), and currently at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric research, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Steven Hyman gave his lectures on ‘The theoretical challenge of modern psychiatry: no easy cure’, which dealt with the future of psychiatry and the potential ‘collision’ between patient’s lived experience and our neurobiological understanding of mental disorders. A small conference was also held on the 5th of November on Hyman’s lectures, where several philosophers of psychiatry spoke, such as Derek Bolton , Tim Thornton , Jonathan Glover , and Julian Savulescu . The title of the first lecture by Hyman was ‘The problem of modern psychiatry: the collision of neurobiological m...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...