Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom. Lorraine Besser   Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no , and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is. Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however,...

This post is by Cherise Rosen . Cherise is a faculty member in the Departments of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-investigator in the Chicago Longitudinal Study (PI: Martin Harrow) and has conducted extensive research in the phenomenological construct of psychosis, with particular emphasis on auditory verbal hallucinations and delusions.    Cherise Rosen Cherise summarizes her recent paper (co-authored with Martin Harrow, Clara Humpston, Liping Tong, Thomas H. Jobe, and Helen Harrow) entitled  ‘An experience of meanings’: A 20-year prospective analysis of delusional realities in schizophrenia and affective psychoses , recently published in  Frontiers in Psychiatry . The authors would like to thank all the individuals who participated in the Chicago Longitudinal Study as their contributions over the 20 years of follow-up made this research possible. This work was supported in part by USPHS Grants MH-...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, “ Do delusions have and give meaning? ”, recently published in  Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  (open access).  Rosa Ritunnano For many people living with psychosis, delusional experiences are hugely distressing. They are not only harmful because of the negative emotions they often carry along, but they are also dysfunctional ( Miyazono, 2015 ). Someone who believes, for example, that everyone in their workplace is reading their thoughts and controlling their movements through a mysterious influencing machine, may feel extremely nervous, gradually withdraw from their friends and family, and give up their job. This can lead to a disruption in good functioning and may be accompanied by a constellation of symptoms attracting...

Today’s post is by Rosa Ritunnano, consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health University of Birmingham. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with Clara Humpston and Matthew Broome, “ Finding order within the disorder: a case study exploring the meaningfulness of delusions ”, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin. In this paper, we ask questions relating to delusions and meaning, as prompted by the clinical encounter with Harry who is, in his own words, “the happiest man in the world”. Harry was referred to Early Intervention for Psychosis (EIP) services for a suspected first episode of psychosis, after telling his doctor that he had been the target of a worldwide conspiracy for more than 5 years. Harry believes that people are being told lies since the day they are born, and that we all live in a sort of “Truman Show” where the government and the NASA are using fake imagery to fool people into believing that what th...

Today's post is by Wouter Kusters , a philosopher, linguist and independent writer, teacher and consultant living in the Netherlands. In 2014 his comprehensive and transgressive book Philosophy of Madness was published in the Netherlands, and later this month the English translation will appear at MIT Press . Here you find an excerpt from the Preface to the English Edition (there is also a video presentation you can watch). Wouter Kusters Madness as I discuss it in this book is the imperfect translation of the Dutch waanzin , with which I focus on the range of experiences of all those who are deemed in medical jargon to be psychotic, as I myself was twice. Its first thematic line is a philosophical examination of the experience of being psychotic. I examine what happens in the various phases of the psychotic experience. What happens to the experience of time and space? What happens to reality? How are other persons perceived, and what happens to thought? It was this highlighting,...

Today's blog is by Emily Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, and Honorary Fellow at ACU’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. She is the author of Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (OUP, 2018) and The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (OUP, 2020). She tweets @emilytwrites. The Meaning of Travel  has been reviewed in  The Spectator,  and  Literary Review . Emily has written about the connections between travel and philosophy in  The Conversation , and about the philosophy of walking for  OUP's blog . She has been interviewed about the book on  BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week , and  BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking . You might think travel and philosophy don’t have much in common. Travel involves flights, bad sandwiches, train tickets. Philosophy is all about books and bearded Greeks. The Meaning of Travel argues that, despite appearances, they have a lot in common. Travel and philosoph...

On 9th September 2019, Yujin Nagasawa organised and hosted a workshop on Life, Death and Meaning – Eastern and Western Perspectives in the Muirhead Tower at the University of Birmingham, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. Muirhead Tower The first speaker, Norichika Horie (University of Tokyo), presented on Spirituality and Meaning of Life and addressed several themes in our philosophical understanding of meaning. He started from the meaning of meaning . In Chinese and Japanese “imi” (meaning) is about externalising and verbalising something internal and has important links with intention. “Imi” is an emotion that stays in the mouth and doesn’t turn into words, it is affective and preverbal. But is meaning something to be explored or something to be produced? Norichika Horie According to Norichika Horie, the relationship between life and death is crucial to what we think about meaning. The story of life ends with deat...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was s...

This post is by  Tim Crane . I am Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. I was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and he taught at UCL for almost twenty years. I founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London , and I am the philosophy editor of the TLS .  I have written five books on the nature of the mind, which is my principal area of interest in philosophy. But I also have a long-standing interest in the nature of religion and religious belief, and The Meaning of Belief is my first serious attempt to write on this subject. The Meaning of Belief attempts to give a description of the phenomenon of religion from an atheist’s point of view — that is, on the assumption that there is no god, supernatural or transcendent reality or being. The book’s aim is not to argue for this atheism, but to give a description of religious belief which makes sense to believers themselves. In t...

Today's post is by project  PERFECT Doctoral Researcher Valeria N. Motta 2018 is my second year as a doctoral researcher on project PERFECT . During my first year, I’ve been investigating loneliness and solitude. For that I did research on existing literature from different philosophical traditions and on the outcomes of empirical research. The existing literature on loneliness has focused on identifying its characteristics and has utilised different approaches. The idea behind finding common features (such as boredom or passivity) is that if we are able to identify them, a specific treatment can be developed in order to alleviate the problem. But documented in the literature I have also found an array of different ways of experiencing loneliness (such as those that emerge from failure to remember traumatic events, or which are masqueraded as connectedness via social media). These cases require a more fine grained approach. I have the privilege to get the support and mult...

The 43rd annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology  was held in Baltimore, Maryland, at Johns Hopkins University from 28-1 July, 2017. The meeting brought together philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists working on issues of common interests. In this post, Federico Bongiorno (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) offers a summary of each of the keynote lectures presented in plenary sessions. On day 1, Daniel Schacter (Harvard) kicked off the conference with a talk on memory distortions and constructive aspects of remembering. Schacter views human memory as being far more a matter of constructive rather than reproductive processes that are sometimes susceptible to error and distortion. Two major themes were pursued. One is the idea that some types of memory distortions are side-effects of otherwise adaptive memory processes. The other is the critical role played by episodic memory, which is defined as the ability to recoll...

This post is by Wolfram Hinzen , who is research professor at ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research), currently investigating language as an aspect of human nature, cognition, and biology at the Grammar and Cognition Lab . In this post, he summarises his recent paper "Can delusions be linguistically explained?", co-authored with Joana Rossello and Peter McKenna and published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Wolfram Hinzen Explanations of delusions often revolve around meaning and knowledge. Indeed the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1959) famously argued that all delusions could be understood as a radical transformation in the awareness of meaning, which became immediate and intrusive attribution. How such an abnormality might give rise to statements such as ‘I am Jesus’, ‘the Royal family are stealing my inventions’ and in extreme cases ‘I have fathered 7,000 children’ or ‘I have invented a machine to run the whole solar system powered ...

This post is by Kengo Miyazono  (pictured above), an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University. Here he summarises his recent paper ' Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind? ', recently published in Synthese. [Penultimate draft available here ]. Andy Clark and David Chalmers ( 1998 ) present the following famous case. Otto Otto suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and like many Alzheimer's patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. […] Today, Otto hears about the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. He consults the notebook, which says that the museum is on 53rd Street, so he walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. Clark and Chalmers (hereafter C & C) argue that 'Otto believed the museum was on ...

For our series of first-person accounts, Kitt O'Malley , blogger and mental health advocate, writes about her experience of altered states and what these mean to her. When I was twenty-one upon returning from my grandfather’s memorial mass at which I gave the eulogy, I first experienced a series of altered mental states which I chose to interpret as God calling me to the ordained ministry. I questioned that sense of call due to my intellectual skepticism, my agnosticism, and the fact that I had a history of mental illness, namely major depression and dysthymia. God did not speak to me in my altered mental states. I heard no voices and saw no visions. The altered states I entered were sometimes ecstatic and sometimes tempting and dark. My interpretation of my experiences was influenced by my familiarity with the works of Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters , and Roman Catholic mystic saints. As I received no definitive instruct...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and co-investigator in project PERFECT. Michael talks about his research interests for this second year of the project, and focuses on shared experience and parity of esteem . My colleague Lisa Bortolotti has written recently about Project PERFECT , and the importance of understanding those aspects of human cognition which are common to both those who seek support from mental health services and those who do not. Lisa’s conceptual work illuminates some of the ways in which, at times, we all may hold beliefs which are difficult for others to share, or act upon reasoning which is difficult for others to understand. Yesterday, I spent a fascinating morning with two clinical psychologists and a group of trainee clinical psychologists, exploring some of the differences and commonalities between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ in our research and practice. We discussed how the task f...

In this post, Piers Benn presents his book entitled Commitment . Piers (pictured above) is a Visiting Lecturer at Heythrop College , University of London, and Adjunct Professor at Fordham University New York, based at its London Centre. He was a lecturer in philosophy and in medical ethics in previous posts. The title I chose for my book for the  Acumen Press  Art of Living series was Commitment (2011) but in many ways it could equally well have been Doubt . Thinking about it afresh after a few years away from it, I can see that it was largely a philosophical attempt to defend various forms of doubt, as a state forced upon us by judicious reasoning rather than desirable in itself. I focused on three main areas where the tension between commitment and doubt felt particularly powerful: love, work and faith. I wanted to uphold the value of commitment, but only when properly thought through. Commitment can be energising, morally improving and conducive to a deeply s...