Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Sally Latham. Sally is a PhD candidate with the Open University Philosophy Department, researching non-narrative approaches to treating mental illness. She also teaches Philosophy A Level at Birmingham Metropolitan College.  Sally Latham Stories are undoubtedly amazing things. Telling and listening to them improves our lives in many ways. However, in my view, this is not true of the stories we tell about our own lives. In my PhD thesis I reject the widely-held view that telling our life-narrative is a good thing. I focus particularly on why illness narratives and narrative-inspired therapies are not always the ideal form of treatment for mental illness (and in fact can do more harm than good). This sits within a far broader social paradigm in which ‘telling your story’ has become almost a cultural imperative, especially when recovering from mental illness. One of the many reasons I believe the dominance of life-narratives to be so worrying is that – contrary to the ...

This post is by  Raphaël Millière  (University of Oxford), reporting from the interdisciplinary conference The Sense of Self  hosted by the Ertegun Scholarship Programme and held from 29th-31st of May at the University of Oxford.  The idea that a sense of self pervades ordinary conscious experience appears to have at least an intuitive appeal for a number of authors in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The aim of this conference was to investigate the very notion of sense of self, which is notoriously elusive and polysemous.  In order to bring some clarity to these discussions and to bridge the gap between conceptual and experimental approaches to the notion, philosophers and scientists were invited to present their work and participate in this interdisciplinary exchange over the course of three days. The first morning was dedicated to conceptual issues regarding the sense of self. The philosopher Marie Guillot (Un...

This post is by  Anil Ananthaswamy , science journalist and author, and consultant for New Scientist magazine. He has previously worked as a staff writer and deputy news editor at New Scientist’s London offices. He teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, and has been a guest editor at the University of California Santa Cruz’s science writing program. In this post, Anil presents his new book, The Man Who Wasn't There. Many people have asked me why I wrote The Man Who Wasn’t There (which examines what neuropsychological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia tell us about the human sense of self), especially since neuroscience is far removed from the topic of my previous book, The Edge of Physics , which dealt with cosmology and astroparticle physics. Curiosity and a desire to write brought me to science journalism—and I went where they took me. The quest to understand the universe and ou...

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...