Long-standing psychiatric practice confirms the pervasive use of pharmacological therapies for treating severe mental disorders. In many circumstances, drugs constitute the best allies of psychotherapeutic interventions. A robust scientific literature is oriented on finding the best strategies to improve therapeutic efficacy through different modes and timing of combined interventions. Nevertheless, we are far from triumphal therapeutic success. Despite the advances made by neuropsychiatry, this medical discipline remains lacking in terms of diagnostic and prognostic capabilities when compared to other branches of (...) medicine. An ethical principle remains as the guidance of therapeutic interventions: improving the quality of life for patients. Unfortunately, psychotropic drugs and psychotherapies do not always result in an efficient remission of symptoms. In this paper I corroborate the idea that therapists should provide drug-resistant patients with every effective and available treatment, even if some of such interventions could be invasive, like Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). ECT carries upon its shoulders a long and dramatic history that should be better investigated to provide new insights. In fact, ECT has attracted renewed interest in recent years. This is due to the fact that antidepressant drugs in younger patients show often scarce effectiveness and unpleasant side-effects. Moreover, I show that, thanks to modern advances, ECT may work as a successful form of treatment for specific and rare cases, such as severe depression (with suicide attempts) and catatonia. (shrink)

Natural Pedagogy refers to social learning based on ostensive communication between adults and infants which results in rapid and efficient transmission of cultural information. The theory predicts that children are able to recognize communicative intention when adults address them using ostensive signals. Furthermore, natural pedagogy predicts that infants ascribe the knowledge they have acquired to others according to what is called the “assumption of universality”. In other words, infants are able to ascribe informative contents to others even when they are (...) outside the bounds of the learning context. Although Csibra and Gergely have so far denied any type of relationship between natural pedagogy and mindreading capacities, I suggest that early mindreading capacities are components of the natural pedagogy system, as recent experimental findings on early Theory of Mind abilities appear to show. (shrink)

Sound-producing movements in percussion performance require a high degree of fine motor control. However, there remains a relatively limited empirical understanding of how performance level abilities develop in percussion performance in general, and marimba performance specifically. To address this issue, nine percussionists performed individualised excerpts on marimba within three testing sessions spaced 29 days apart to assess early, intermediate, and late stages of motor learning. Motor learning was quantified via analyses of both the temporal control of mallet movements, and the (...) spatial variability of upper-limb movements. The results showed that temporal control of mallet movements was greater in the intermediate compared to the early learning session, with no significant additional improvements revealed in the late learning session. In addition, spatial variability in the left and right elbows decreased within the intermediate compared to the early learning session. The results suggest that temporal control of mallet movements may be driven by reductions in spatial variability of elbow movements specifically. As a result, this study provides novel evidence for kinematic mechanisms underlying motor learning in percussion which can be applied towards enhancing musical training. (shrink)

Digitalisation and emerging technologies affect our lives and are increasingly present in a growing number of fields. Ethical implications of the digitalisation process have therefore long been discussed by the scholars. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has taken the legal and ethical discussion to another level. There is no doubt that AI can have a positive impact on the society. The focus here, however, is on its more negative impact. This article will specifically consider how the law and ethics (...) in their interaction can be applied in a situation where a disabled person needs some kind of assistive technology to participate in the society as an equal member. This article intends to investigate whether the EU Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, as a milestone of ethics concerning technology, has the power to change the current practice of how social and economic rights are applied. The main focus of the article is the ethical requirements ‘Human agency and oversight’ and, more specifically, fundamental rights. (shrink)

In the last decades neuroscience provided so many important contributions to philosophy of mind that nowadays the latter is inconceivable without the former in every topic this philosophical branch deals with. The studies connected to action understanding provided great advances in the field of developmental psychology for what concerns social learning abilities grounded on imitation. All information received by the infants are transmitted through actions. It would be impossible to conceive infant imitation without action interpretation. According to Meltzoff’s “like-me” hypothesis, (...) imitation is possible in human infants already at birth in virtue of an identification mechanism with the adults supported by mirror neurons (MNs) based simulation system. However, if we split the types of actions into two general categories, instrumental and communicative actions, we will see, according to an alternative account, how infants modulate differently the comprehension of observed scenarios, depending on whether they are passive observers (in the case of instrumental actions) or actively involved (in the case of communicative actions). Such a recognition of action features seems to be evident through different degrees of motor activation, as ERP techniques applied to infants and young adults revealed. Neuroscientific evidence highlight the crucial role of brain areas connected to motor activation for action interpretation, but at the same time, they allow both a bottom-up process and a top-down process interpretation whereby the motor activation is seen as a product of action understanding rather than its determining causal factor. The aim of the present study is to examine such epistemological conflicting perspectives underlying action interpretation, and their repercussions on different social learning theories. (shrink)