Imperfect Cognitions

My name is Andrew Sims . Right now I’m working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in an Action de Recherche Concertée (ARC) project on action theory and neuroscience. Before this, though, I wrote my PhD dissertation in the philosophy department at Deakin University and while visiting at the Department of Clinical, Health and Educational Psychology at University College London. My dissertation focused upon the psychodynamic explanation of anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP)—denial of paralysis—and its relationship to cognitive deficit models of the condition. I’ve recently had an article published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology that draws upon some of this work (Sims 2017). Thanks very much to Andrea Polonioli for inviting me to introduce it on the Imperfect Cognitions blog. AHP occurs after brain damage and involves a paralysis on one side along with various attitudinal distortions toward that paralysis. At a minimum, this is an inabil...

Today's post is by Peter McKenna. He is a psychiatrist with some background in psychology, currently working full-time in research in Barcelona . He introduces his new book Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . I have been interested in delusions for a long time and around five years ago decided to try and write a book on the topic. The result, for better or worse, is Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . The ‘un-understandable’ of the title references Jaspers’ contention that delusions are a) psychologically irreducible, ie they cannot be derived from other psychological experiences, either normal or abnormal; and b) are unmediated, ie they are immediate rather than being the product of reflection (for a good and concise account of Jaspers’ views, see Walker, 1991). Apart from the work of Jaspers, who was a philosopher as well as a psychiatrist and whose thoughts on delusions have influenced successive generations of clinicians, I made ...

This is the fifth in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Aikaterini Fotopoulou summarises her paper ' The Virtual Bodily Self:  Mentalisation of the Body as Revealed in Anosognosia for Hemiplegia '.  How do humans know what is real? As though the philosophical issues raised by this question were not complex enough, my paper tries to tackle an even more convoluted question; how do humans know what is real about their own body? A simple answer would be that they have an evolutionary prescribed perceptual system that allows their brain to combine and ‘read out’ various signals about the body deriving from (a) within the body (e.g. heart beats), (b) outside the body (e.g. light), and (c) the body’s boundary, the skin (e.g. pressure). This answer however turns out to be simplistic both philosophically and scientifically. Thankfully for the reader, the paper...