Category: Theory

PsyArt is an online journal dedicated the use of psychology in understanding the impact and meaning of art.

It’s a peer-reviewed journal which has been publishing quality analyses of the art-psychology borderlands for almost a decade now.

The full-text articles are freely available online, meaning you can pass on the links and read the full papers without a subscription.

Recent article include The Silence of Madness in ‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov [link] and Perspectivism ‚Äî A Powerful Cognitive Metaphor [link].

Link to PsyArt journal.

A classic quote from R.D. Laing of anti-psychiatry fame:

I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven’t got words for. For instance, the word “paranoia.” It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don’t think that he is. But we haven’t got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.

PsyBlog has just started a series looking at whether the different findings, concepts and predictions of the various schools of psychology could ever be explained by one ‘grand theory’.

By drawing on excerpts from the existing literature, the series gives us a tour through a radical rethinking of how we explain the action of the mind.

Alternatively, perhaps a search for a ‘grand unifying theory’ is just physics envy at its most ridiculous, where psychology is just trying to ape the most absurd aspects of modern theoretical physics.

Whether it sounds like a grand vision or navel gazing to you, the series covers all angles, and there is more to come in the series.

Link to ‘Unity in Psychology: The Search Starts Here’ from PsyBlog.

Depravity is a concept often used in criminal trials when making decisions on the seriousness or gravity of a particular crime. The depravity scale is a project to develop a measure of depravity, and is asking members of the public to help develop it.

It is the brainchild of forensic psychiatrist Dr Michael Welner who wants the concept of depravity to be more rigorous and psychometrically sound, so it can be measured reliably.

The depravity scale website asks members of the public to rank specific scenarios for how depraved they are, to get an estimation of how people understand and use the concept of depravity.

The scale has not been without controversy, however, with some professionals questioning whether psychiatry should become involved in making moral decisions.

Forensic psychiatry is particularly interesting in this regard, as it attempts to distinguish ‘bad’ from ‘mad’.

This project is also interesting in light of the history of psychiatry and madness. The idea that mental illness is the result of the breakdown of the mechanisms of mind and brain is a relatively new idea, and traditionally mental illness was seen as a moral failing.

Psychiatry (or mad-doctoring as it was known then) brought madness into the medical realm, where previously it was the domain of the church. Just like today, there were accusations that doctors were interfering in moral issues.

Link to The Depravity Scale website.
Link to story on the project from Psychiatric News.
Link to NY Daily News story on the scale.

An article in American Scientist bemoans the division of research into schools and traditions in modern universities as counter productive, and argues that the cognitive and biological sciences are now at the forefront of combining science and art practice.

I would probably argue philosophy has always had a similarly broad outlook, but the author argues that science is where the new action is.

…but while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology.

Link to article ‘Science and the Theft of Humanity’ (via 3Quarks).

Harvard Magazine has an article on the increasing willingness of psychiatrists to prescribe medication for distressing but relatively common life problems and whether this is blurring the boundaries between mental illness and mental health.

Using an ever-expanding arsenal of neurochemical drugs, physicians now treat variants of mood and temperament that previous generations viewed as an inescapable part of life. In an earlier era, James’s fears might have forced him to change professions. Today, the exceptionally shy and the overly anxious, the hyperactive and the chronically unhappy can seek relief from their suffering though medical intervention. And the parameters of what constitutes a “mental disorder” have swelled. An estimated 22 million Americans currently take psychotropic medications—most for relatively mild conditions.

This widespread embrace of biological remedies to life’s problems raises troubling questions for psychiatry. Paradoxically, even though psychopharmaceutical sales have soared in the United States during the past 20 years, only half of those with severe disorders receive adequate treatment. Clinicians and researchers disagree over what the priorities of the field should be and whom they should count as mentally ill. Are we over-treating the normal at the expense of the truly disturbed? Can we adequately distinguish illness from idiosyncrasy, disease from discontent? And are we allowing pharmaceutical companies and insurers to define the boundary between illness and health?

Freud famously made a distinction between unhappiness and mental illness, and wanted his therapy to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness”.

As with many medical treatments (such as plastic surgery), mind-altering drugs are now being used on those without previously recognisable medical problems in an attempt to improve quality of life.

So-called ‘smart drugs’, ‘cognitive enhancers’ and the use of psychiatric drugs to help with life stresses are examples of something psychiatrist Peter Kramer has called “cosmetic pharmacology”.

The Harvard Magazine article looks at whether this trend is actually negatively affecting the understanding and treatment of major mental illness, and warping the diagnostic systems upon which psychiatry relies.

Link to article ‘Psychiatry by Prescription’ via (3Quarks).

Brain Ethics has just picked up on the recent development of “evolutionary psychiatry” (evo-psychiatry for short) that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of how we have evolved to become susceptible to disabling thought and behaviour patterns.

Evolutionary approaches to disease – including mental disease – is an attempt to describe and explain the design characteristics that make us susceptible to the disease (from Nesse & Williams, 1996). The evolutionary trajectories of humans is far from a travel towards perfection. We are full of errors and somatic and mental shortcomings – and the appendix, near-sightedness, and a bottleneck attentional system and the like are examples of this.

Another important issue is that the border between normal and abnormal psychology is becoming increasingly muddled. That may sound as a problem, but it’s actually caused by a change in our understanding of how our minds come to be, and especially how normal variation extends into pathological domains. In this sense, it’s hard to draw waterproof boundaries between normal and abnormal psychology. We work on a continuum, and the branch of modern evolutionary psychiatry makes a good case for such an approach.

The post discusses a recent special issue of the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry (snappy title!) that discusses the various approaches in the field, and how they could help better understand mental illness.

Link to Brain Ethics on evo-psychiatry.

A new issue of respected online consciousness journal Psyche has just been published with a special issue on self-representation and consciousness.

The issue debates the idea that mental states are only conscious when they are structured both to represent a particular object of thought and themselves.

Take the ticking of a clock. The brain will support a mental representation of this sound, even when you’re not conscious of it.

The self-representation hypothesis argues that for the ticking to be consciously available, the mental representation must ‘describe’ both the sound, and itself (“I’m a mental state of a ticking clock”) so the rest of the conscious mind can access and manipulate it.

However, some have argued that this theory requires an infinite number of descriptions and redescriptions and so can’t be plausible.

The various articles in the issue are written by some of the most active philosophers of mind and make for fascinating reading.

By the way, the use of ‘iff’ in the introduction is not a typo, it’s a shorthand used by philosophers for if and only if.

Link to Psyche journal.
pdf of introduction to special issue.

The idea that the mind is the result of the function of the brain is so widely accepted within neuroscience as to almost be its defining statement. It’s suprising then when you find someone who’s arguing against this idea in a coherent and thoughtful manner.

The blog Science is a Method not a Position keeps tabs on the world of the cognitive and neurosciences and puts forward alternative interpretations that suggest there may be more to the mind than the firing of neurons.

Even if you don’t buy the main argument, the blog highlights how our simple assumptions aren’t always as watertight as we believe them to be.

Link to Science is a Method not a Position.

Philosopher Alex Byrne writes about the problem of consciousness in the Boston Review. Against the current trend of labelling it ‘the hard problem’, Byrne argues that it may be easier to understand than we think.

Byrne does a fantastic job of touring us through some of the classic problems and thinkers in the area, using Thomas Nagel’s famous article on consciousness ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ as a starting point.

The problem centres around the link between our own subjective conscious experience and the biological function of the brain, and whether it is possible to explain one in terms of the other.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the area, and Byrne does a great job of telling an engaging story.

Link to article ‘What mind-body problem?’ (via 3QuarksDaily).
Link to Alex Byrne’s webpage (with publications online).

John Searle, one of the most important and controversial philosophers of mind, is featured on this week’s ABC Radio The Philosopher’s Zone discussing the question of consciousness.

Searle has been active since the 1960s and has made some of the most influential contributions to cognitive science, including the famous Chinese room thought experiment that addresses the question of whether information processing would be sufficient to account for intelligent thought.

Understandably, this has been used in arguments about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness.

Searle has long argued that machines cannot be conscious, and that conscious states can only be supported by biological systems.

In the programme, Searle talks about his own approach to solving the problem of consciousness, the importance of understanding neurobiology, and the dangers of getting in bed with Descartes.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

The Wikipedia article on the Philosophy of Mind is featured on the online encyclopaedia’s front page today, demonstrating how the philosophy articles have greatly improved during the last year.

The article gives a clear and comprehensive overview of this key field and is beautifully illustrated throughout.

Philosophy has a bit of an image problem among scientists. Some dismiss it as self-indulgent, but nowhere could it be farther from the truth than in cognitive science.

Philosophers now make up essential team members in many neuropsychology research groups, valued for their critical insight and knowledge of how certain types of difficult conceptual problems can be overcome.

I’m most familiar with the work of Professor Martin Davies who works with the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science and usefully makes all his work available online.

This is a good place to start if you want an introduction to how philosophy can contribute to the understanding of brain-injury, mental illness and the neuropsychological function of the health individual.

If you want a general introduction to the field, the Wikipedia article is your first port of call.

Link to Wikipedia article on Philosophy of Mind.
Link to Martin Davies’ publications.

The Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a programming library that takes much of the pain out of constructing artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling projects.

It is free software, incredibly professional, well documented, fully supported, and available for a number of programming languages both mainstream and obscure.

There’s also a concise introduction to neural networks (pdf) which covers some of the operating principles for those wanting to know how they work.

Neural networks are used both as software tools for completing otherwise difficult tasks, and in cognitive science for simulating cognitive processes.

In neuropsychology, neural networks are often created to simulate a certain cognitive task, and then the network is ‘damaged’ to see whether the network can predict the effects of brain injury or impairment.

This connectionist approach to cognitive science was made particularly popular by the 1986 book Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (ISBN 0262631121) by David Rumelhart and James McClelland.

Link to Fast Artificial Neural Network Library.
pdf of ‘Neural Networks Made Simple’.
Link to Wikipedia page on ‘connectionism’.

Technology and society magazine The New Atlantis has a comprehensive article on ‘neuroelectronics’ – the science of interfacing digital components with neural wetware.

The potential merging of mind and machine thrills, frightens, and intrigues us. For decades, experiments at the border between brains and electronics have led to sensationalistic media coverage, vivid science fiction portrayals, and dreams of cyborgs and bionic men. But recently, this area of science has seen remarkable advances—from robotic limbs controlled directly by brain activity, to brain implants that alter the mood of the depressed, to rats steered by remote control. Adam Keiper explores the peculiar history and present directions of this research, and considers the challenges of staying human in the age of neuroelectronics.

Link to article ‘The Age of Neuroelectronics’.

Like a neuropsychological tag-team, the other half of the Brain Ethics blog duo has followed up his partner’s recent Science and Consciousness Review article, with his own on Art and the Conscious Brain.

Martin Skov specialises in neuroaesthetics, the science of understanding how art and beauty is understood by the mind and brain.

Critics sometimes ask if the illumination of neurobiological mechanisms adds anything important to old-fashioned ‚Äì i.e., philosophical ‚Äì aesthetic inquiry. I think that already Plato and Aristotle already answered that. As they pointed out, works of art are created with the express purpose of provoking a mental representation in the brains that experience them. Thus, to understand the nature of art you also have to understand the cognitive processes responsible for turning the perceptual properties of any art object into a mental representation. How colour, lines, etc. are magically transformed into Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is very much a question of how the brain works.

Neuroaesthetics is becoming an increasingly popular field in contemporary neuroscience, with an increasing number of books and even regular conferences now devoted to the field.

Update: It looks like Science and Consciousness Review are having some minor connection issues at the moment. Hopefully, normal service should be resumed shortly.

Link to Art and the Conscious Brain by Martin Skov.

Several recent reviews have tackled biologist Lewis Wolpert’s new book on the biology of belief Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (ISBN 0571209203).

In his book, Wolpert tackles religious belief in some detail, joining the fray with Daniel Dennett who has recently been promoting his own book on religion Breaking the Spell (see previously).

John Gray’s review in the New Statesman is most skeptical about both Dennett and Wolpert, arguing that they’re “of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith”.

The review in Time Magazine tackles the scientific arguments in more detail, as does the review in The Times, and are both more positive in their appraisal – with The Times going as far as saying it has “beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity”.

Link to review in the New Statesman.
Link to review in Time Magazine.
Link to review in The Times.