Comparing the phenomenology, neurochemical pathology, and psychopharmacology of hallucinations and dreaming is limited by the available data. Evidence to date reveals no simple correspondence between the two states. Differences in the phenomenology of visual hallucinations and the visual component of dreams may reflect variations in visual context acting on the same underlying mechanism – the minimal visual input during dreaming contrasts with the more substantial perceived context in hallucinations. Variations in cholinergic, dopaminergic and serotonergic neurotransmitter function during sleep and during (...) hallucinations in Lewy body dementias, together with relevant drug effects suggest that, on the whole, different, potentially opposite, changes characterise the two states. A similar analysis of other psychotic features in Lewy body dementia and other disorders suggests that, in contrast to hallucinations, there may be more convincing parallels between dreaming and delusional states. (shrink)

As many as two million people in the United Kingdom repeatedly see people, animals, and objects that have no objective reality. Hallucinations on the border of sleep, dementing illnesses, delirium, eye disease, and schizophrenia account for 90% of these. The remainder have rarer disorders. We review existing models of recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in the awake person, including cortical irritation, cortical hyperexcitability and cortical release, top-down activation, misperception, dream intrusion, and interactive models. We provide evidence that these can neither (...) fully account for the phenomenology of RCVH, nor for variations in the frequency of RCVH in different disorders. We propose a novel Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model for RCVH. A combination of impaired attentional binding and poor sensory activation of a correct proto-object, in conjunction with a relatively intact scene representation, bias perception to allow the intrusion of a hallucinatory proto-object into a scene perception. Incorporation of this image into a context-specific hallucinatory scene representation accounts for repetitive hallucinations. We suggest that these impairments are underpinned by disturbances in a lateral frontal cortex–ventral visual stream system. We show how the frequency of RCVH in different diseases is related to the coexistence of attentional and visual perceptual impairments; how attentional and perceptual processes can account for their phenomenology; and that diseases and other states with high rates of RCVH have cholinergic dysfunction in both frontal cortex and the ventral visual stream. Several tests of the model are indicated, together with a number of treatment options that it generates. Key Words: Blindness; Charles Bonnet; cholinergic; cortical release; delirium; dementia; dream intrusion; hallucination; Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model; schizophrenia. (shrink)

Merker's core idea, that the experience of being conscious reflects the interactions of actions, targets, and motivations in the upper brainstem, with cortex providing the content of the conscious experience, merits serious consideration. However, we have two areas of concern: first, that his definition of consciousness is so broad that it is difficult to find any organisms with a brain that could be non-conscious; second, that the focus on one cortical–subcortical system neglects other systems (e.g., basal forebrain and brainstem cholinergic (...) systems and their cortical and thalamic target areas) which may be of at least equal significance. (Published Online May 1 2007). (shrink)

Applying Behrendt & Young's (B&Y's) model of thalamocortical synchrony to complex visual hallucinations in neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia with Lewy bodies and progressive supranuclear palsy, leads us to propose that the primary pathology may be cortical rather than thalamic. Additionally, the extinction of active hallucinations by eye closure challenges their conception of the role of reduced sensory input.

Commentators agree that the Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model is a promising model for accounting for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) across several disorders, though with varying detailed criticisms. Its central tenets are not modified, but further consideration of generative models of visual processing and the relationship of proto-objects and memory systems allows the PAD model to deal with variations in phenomenology. The commentaries suggest new ways to generate evidence that will test the model.

Plagiarism is increasingly evident in business and academia. Though links between demographic, personality, and situational factors have been found, previous research has not used actual plagiarism behavior as a criterion variable. Previous research on academic dishonesty has consistently used self-report measures to establish prevalence of dishonest behavior. In this study we use actual plagiarism behavior to establish its prevalence, as well as relationships between integrity-related personal selection and workplace deviance measures. This research covers new ground in two respects: (a) That (...) the academic dishonesty literature is subject to revision using criterion variables to avoid self bias and social desirability issues and (b) we establish the relationship between actual academic dishonesty and potential workplace deviance/white-collar crime. (shrink)

Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers (...) themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. -/- Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge network; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it. (shrink)

Plagiarism is increasingly evident in business and academia. Though links between demographic, personality, and situational factors have been found, previous research has not used actual plagiarism behavior as a criterion variable. Previous research on academic dishonesty has consistently used self-report measures to establish prevalence of dishonest behavior. In this study we use actual plagiarism behavior to establish its prevalence, as well as relationships between integrity-related personal selection and workplace deviance measures. This research covers new ground in two respects: (a) That (...) the academic dishonesty literature is subject to revision using criterion variables to avoid self bias and social desirability issues and (b) we establish the relationship between actual academic dishonesty and potential workplace deviance/white-collar crime. (shrink)

Given its subject matter, biological psychiatry is uniquely poised to lead STEM DEI initiatives related to disability. Drawing on literatures in science, philosophy, psychiatry, and disability studies, we outline how that leadership might be undertaken. We first review existing opportunities for the advancement of DEI in biological psychiatry around axes of gender and race. We then explore the expansion of biological psychiatry’s DEI efforts to disability, especially along the lines of representation and access, community accountability, first person testimony, and revised (...) theoretical frameworks for pathology. We close with concrete recommendations for scholarship and practice going forward. By tackling head-on the challenge of disability inclusion, biological psychiatry has the opportunity to be a force of transformation in the biological sciences and beyond. (shrink)

In the half decade following the 2007 financial crisis, the reform of global financial governance was driven by two separate policy debates: one on the substantive content of regulations, the other on the organizational architecture of their governance. The separation of the two debates among policymakers has been mirrored in academia, where postcrisis analyses of financial governance have remained detached from reinvigorated discussions about the nature of financial markets. We argue that this separation is deeply flawed. Presenting an analysis of (...) interactions between standards for banking, credit rating, accounting, and derivatives trading, this article demonstrates why the appropriateness of the organizational architecture of global financial governance is necessarily contingent upon one’s understanding of how financial markets work. In particular, if financial markets are not anchored to external “economic fundamentals” but instead exhibit reflexivity, then the reciprocal interactions between different regulatory arenas demand considerably more organizational coordination than presently exists. (shrink)

Bioethics has received important criticisms for its perceived privileging of biomedical authority with longstanding calls for greater recognition of the social, political, economic, historical, and...

PurposeAlthough an increasing body of literature suggests a relationship between brain irradiation and deterioration of neurocognitive function, it remains as the standard therapeutic and prophylactic modality in patients with brain tumors. This review was aimed to abstract and evaluate the prediction models for radiation-induced neurocognitive decline in patients with primary or secondary brain tumors.MethodsMEDLINE was searched on October 31, 2021 for publications containing relevant truncation and MeSH terms related to “radiotherapy,” “brain,” “prediction model,” and “neurocognitive impairments.” Risk of bias was (...) assessed using the Prediction model Risk Of Bias ASsessment Tool.ResultsOf 3,580 studies reviewed, 23 prediction models were identified. Age, tumor location, education level, baseline neurocognitive score, and radiation dose to the hippocampus were the most common predictors in the models. The Hopkins verbal learning and the trail making tests were the most frequent outcome assessment tools. All studies used regression as machine learning method. All models were judged to have a high risk of bias mainly due to issues in the analysis.ConclusionExisting models have limited quality and are at high risk of bias. Following recommendations are outlined in this review to improve future models: developing cognitive assessment instruments taking into account the peculiar traits of the different brain tumors and radiation modalities; adherence to model development and validation guidelines; careful choice of candidate predictors according to the literature and domain expert consensus; and considering radiation dose to brain substructures as they can provide important information on specific neurocognitive impairments. (shrink)

Epilepsy surgery is the most effective therapeutic approach for children with drug resistant epilepsy. Recent advances in neurosurgery, such as the Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy, improved the safety and non-invasiveness of this method. Electric and magnetic source imaging plays critical role in the delineation of the epileptogenic focus during the presurgical evaluation of children with DRE. Yet, they are currently underutilized even in tertiary epilepsy centers. Here, we present a case of an adolescent who suffered from DRE for 16 years (...) and underwent surgery at Cook Children's Medical Center. The patient was previously evaluated in a level 4 epilepsy center and treated with multiple antiseizure medications for several years. Presurgical evaluation at CCMC included long-term video electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography with simultaneous conventional EEG and high-density EEG in two consecutive sessions, MRI, and fluorodeoxyglucose - positron emission tomography. Video long-term EEG captured nine focal-onset clinical seizures with a maximal evolution over the right frontal/frontal midline areas. MRI was initially interpreted as non-lesional. FDG-PET revealed a small region of hypometabolism at the anterior right superior temporal gyrus. ESI and MSI performed with dipole clustering showed a tight cluster of dipoles in the right anterior insula. The patient underwent intracranial EEG which indicated the right anterior insular as seizure onset zone. Eventually LITT rendered the patient seizure free. Retrospective analysis of ESI and MSI clustered dipoles found a mean distance of dipoles from the ablated volume ranging from 10 to 25 mm. Our findings highlight the importance of recent technological advances in the presurgical evaluation and surgical treatment of children with DRE, and the underutilization of epilepsy surgery in children with DRE. (shrink)

Daniel Kodaj has recently developed a pro-atheistic argument that he calls “the problem of religious evil.” This first premise of this argument is “belief in God causes evil.” Although this idea that belief in God causes evil is widely accepted, certainly in the secular West, it is sufficiently problematic as to be unsuitable as a basis for an argument for atheism, as Kodaj seeks to use it. In this paper I shall highlight the problems inherent in it in three (...) ways: by considering whether it is reasonable to say that “belief in God” causes evil; whether it is reasonable to say that belief in God “causes” evil; and whether it is reasonable to say that belief in God causes “evil.” In each case I will argue that it is problematic to make such claims, and accordingly I will conclude that the premise “belief in God causes evil” is unacceptable as it stands, and consequently is unable to ground Kodaj’s pro-atheistic argument. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this commentary I suggest that a comparative investigation of Ancient psychological notions may contribute to Professor Lloyd's project of understanding the role that analogy plays in human reasoning. In particular, I propose that the Greek notion of imagination may serve as a starting point. I argue that, because in Platonic and Aristotelian thought the ultimate object of knowledge is form, thinkers working in this paradigm were obliged to introduce a faculty mediating between the senses and the intellect. This (...) is the imagination. Some of the problems associated with Greek conceptions of imagination carry over to the use of analogy. I suggest that because Chinese thought had a very different approach to images and a different approach to the object of knowledge, they did not need to forge a conception of a specific faculty of imagination and were thus in a position to exploit analogies in a way which was rather different from Greeks. (shrink)

Review of Perrys *Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness*.

Introduction to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, is the most comprehensive topically organized collection of classical and contemporary philosophy available. Building on the exceptionally successful tradition of previous editions, this edition for the first time incorporates the insights of a new coeditor, John Martin Fischer, and has been updated and revised to make it more accessible. Ideal for introductory philosophy courses, the text includes sections on the meaning of life, God and evil, knowledge and reality, the philosophy of science, the mind/body problem, (...) freedom of will, consciousness, ethics, and philosophical puzzles and paradoxes. It presents seventy substantial--and in some cases complete--selections from the best and most influential works in philosophy, offering a unique balance between classical and contemporary material. An extensive glossary of philosophical terms is also included. The fourth edition features fifteen new readings, including work by Albert Camus, Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel Dennett, Harry G. Frankfurt, William Paley, Derek Parfit, John Perry, Richard Taylor, Peter Van Inwagen, Bernard Williams, and Susan Wolf. Part III, Knowledge and Reality, has been restructured and now includes Plato's Thaetetus, selections by Edmund L. Gettier and Robert Nozick, and an essay by Christopher Grau that explores the philosophical concepts presented in the popular film The Matrix. Two new ethics puzzles--"The Trolley Problem" and "Ducking Harm and Sacrificing Others"--are also included. This edition incorporates Study Questions after each reading and is accompanied by an Instructor's CD and a Student Companion Website, both containing helpful resources. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Black Natural Law by Vincent W. LloydDaniel A. MorrisBlack Natural Law Vincent W. Lloyd NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. XV + 180 PP. $49.95Black Natural Law introduces and analyzes a "tradition" (Vincent Lloyd's term throughout the text) of African American natural law reflection. In so doing, Lloyd dismantles stubborn boundaries between Christian ethics, black religion, and American religious history. Black Christian writers such as (...) Frederick Douglass are often confined to the category of "history" and rarely elevated to esteemed intellectual disciplines such as "theology" and "ethics." Lloyd reverses that tendency. Like Catherine Bell, Robert Orsi, Miguel De La Torre, and others, he makes us question the hierarchical dualism between thought and practice, and our habit of associating white Christianities with the former and nonwhite Christianities with the latter. This book is worth reading for that feature alone. But there are many other worthwhile arguments as well.In his surveys of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lloyd identifies a coherent tradition of natural law reflection in African American Christianity that imagines a concentric series of laws, including God's law, moral law, and civic law. The tradition emphasizes the image of God in all human beings and thus the "inherent value of human life" (22). Black natural law reflection is distinctive primarily because it is rooted in black experience. At its core, it is informed by experiences of oppression sponsored by the civic law. Critique of ideology (which Lloyd sometimes uses as a synonym for civic/worldly law) is at the heart of black natural law, as is the organizing of social movements as a practical outgrowth of that critique. Lloyd also shows that black natural law sets itself apart from its white/European counterparts by understanding reason and emotion as mutually informing: emotion does and indeed should inform reason in moral reflection. And because God privileges the oppressed, black natural law also emphasizes its own priority over white theological ethics. Through close readings of black theologians, Lloyd pulls all these features together and persuasively shows that there is a coherent tradition of black natural law thinking in American Christianity. This primary argument is clear and indispensable for scholars of either black theology or natural law (or both).Lloyd also makes a provocative historical argument: the tradition began to decline after the civil rights movement and is currently in a state of disarray. He writes that "elements of black natural law continued to be invoked in various [End Page 199] ways during the decades that followed the civil rights movement—invoked in ways that were disconnected from the tradition" (120). He shows that literary, activist, and political uses of natural law ideas within black communities have lost the coherence and distinctive features that they once had. This argument includes innovative interpretations and critiques of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, and others. This argument is all the more worthwhile for scholars and students of ethics and American religious history because Lloyd notes that a coherent expression of black natural law could help meet the crisis of mass incarceration.The book could, at times, engage secondary sources more effectively; for example, which natural law theories "focus exclusively on the human capacity to reason" (38)? How have other scholars understood Douglass's invocation of natural law concepts? It also offers an underdeveloped critique of pragmatism. These quarrels are trivial, though, in light of the thought-provoking arguments that Lloyd offers. Scholars working on Christian ethics, American religious thought, and black Christianity should all read this book. Black Natural Law would fit well on upper-level and graduate syllabi in these fields.Daniel A. MorrisAugustana CollegeCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Never Mind the Gap: Neurophenomenology, Radical Enactivism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness” by Michael D. Kirchhoff & Daniel D. Hutto. Upshot: Enactivism is a welcome development in cognitive science, but its “radical” rejection of representation poses problems for capturing phenomenality. The totality of our interactions exceeds our awareness, so circumscribing the activity that constitutes consciousness seems to require representational guidance.

Arash Abizadeh's main thesis is that Hobbes severed juridical obligation—a covenant-created practice of second-personal accountability—from allegedly prudential natural law, marking a "watershed" separation of the right from the good. Daniel Eggers, Mark Peacock, and David D. Raphael fruitfully explored that thesis. The proposed independence is doubtful because natural law both underwrites and constrains covenant: "a...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Bad, the Ugly, and the Need for a Position by PsychiatryLloyd A. Wells (bio)Keywordsvice, psychiatric education, psychiatry-law interface, medicalizationSadler’s paper is thought provoking and will resonate with many psychiatrists who deal with the interface of vice and psychiatric syndromes. This interface and the dilemmas it poses are perhaps most discussed by residents, who are dealing with the issue for the first time and who often debate what is (...) “psychiatric” about these cases. Many residents have their own informal systems of classifying vice, often with a divide between the criminal population and those perceived as avoiding work and responsibility. These unofficial classifications are usually judgmental and often pejorative, but the residents rarely get much help from faculty in this area. Indeed, many of the faculty have equally judgmental and pejorative views, which are neither systematized nor subject to systematic analysis.By clarifying the importance of the issue of the vice–mental disorder relationship (VMDR) to psychiatry, Sadler may move this topic to one that receives Socratic discourse in our training programs and serious consideration in the training of psychiatrists rather than an idiosyncratic lumping of these patients into the broad category of “patients I don’t like.”Sadler asks for comments in several categories: historical intractability, goals of psychiatry, taxonomy, implications for the criminal justice system, implications for the law, and ethical/political implications.Issues of historical intractability are long standing. In A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain, written in the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe (1724–1727) describes many asylums, often with the comment, “as it is a madhouse, so is it also a house of correction.” Some of the great public hospitals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were built at least as much to get antisocial and homeless people off the streets as to provide care for the mentally ill. The moral treatment of France and Great Britain, which added much to the practice of psychiatry, clearly had punitive “treatments” for patients with vice-laden behaviors, and this was very explicit in the American moral model of treatment of the late nineteenth century with its obsessive need to prevent patients from masturbating. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was great debate about the inclusion of Pritchard’s “moral insanity”—now sanitized into “personality disorders”—into the psychiatric domain, and Kraepelin referred to this group as “enemies of society.”Sadler next asks us to consider the goals of psychiatry in regard to “a proper VMDR.” He wonders [End Page 43] whether a strict medicalization account can be defended. I think it is clear from a large literature and from clinical experience that it cannot be defended —now. But it may become defensible in this century, which will pose enormous challenges to psychiatry, lawmakers, and the courts (vide infra). A strict moralization model is defended by many in society, including some psychiatrists, but has severe limitations and seems illogical. It is hard to make a case (though juries have done so) that, for example, a very delusional young woman with postpartum psychosis who murders her children because of the belief that far worse things than death will happen to them imminently if they live, fits the moralization approach. The Dahmer case is especially instructive. Although there was enormous “vice” (and perhaps “evil”), it is hard to make a case that a sane man would make temples out of the body parts of victims and would attempt to commune with the dead through them.He wonders whether a “mixed” version of medicalization/moralization can be developed and defended. I would argue for both a mixed approach and a “shared” approach. A middle adolescent with bipolar disorder burned his house to the ground. (Fortunately, he and family members were injured but not killed.) He was wildly manic at the time and set the fire because he wanted to prove that he was immortal and totally impervious to flames. He was delusional, extraordinarily impulsive, and completely without judgment, and it would be extraordinarily difficult to exclude the medical frame in any consideration of the vice involved. The vice, indeed, may be more involved in his decision while euthymic to stop taking... (shrink)

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against (...) the three assumptions helps point in the direction of a better account. (shrink)

This article examines how domestic violence impacts the lives and education of young children, children, and young people and how they can be supported within the education system. Schools are often the service in closest and longest contact with a child living with domestic violence; teachers can play a vital role in helping families access welfare services. In the wake of high profile cases of child abuse and neglect, concerns have been raised about the effectiveness of multi-agency responses to children (...) living with abuse. In the UK, the case of four-year-old Daniel Pelka who died in 2012 following abuse and starvation by his mother, who experienced domestic violence, and her partner, led to a serious case review. It found recording systems in Daniel’s school were not used consistently, and details held by different agencies were not collated to enable the formation of a coherent assessment. The lack of integrated working cited in the report echoes findings from previous serious case reviews. A strong correlation exists between domestic abuse and child abuse, with approximately half of all domestic violence situations involving direct child abuse. Children can also be affected indirectly by violence occurring in their home by seeing or hearing it taking place. This article examines the impact of domestic violence on the mental health of children, and the impact on their education. Violence in children’s lives often causes disruption to their schooling and harms the quality of their educational experiences and outcomes. The abuse children experience can result in emotional trauma, physical and psychological barriers to learning, and disruptive behavior in school, while the underlying causes of these problems remain hidden. Knowing when and how to seek advice from multi-agency professionals is an essential part of effective practice among school staff. Despite their vital role in identifying signs of abuse and signposting referral pathways, research indicates teachers often lack confidence and knowledge for such work. The article examines how the professional learning and professional confidence of teachers can be developed, and how recent policy and practice developments in the UK have the potential to influence work in this area. (shrink)

The article focuses on surfing to consider the attractiveness of using the sublime to describe experiences and emotions in nature sports. The sublime is shown to be a red herring in scholarship as it fails to account for many of the valuable experiences available to nature sports enthusiasts. The article draws on the work of Genevieve Lloyd to propose that wonder is a more suitable concept that gets to the heart not only of the terror and awe that nature (...) can inspire, but also to the orientation towards our finitude, difference, and the stimulation of growth and practical knowledge that nature sports also inspire (and that are not accounted for in the sublime). (shrink)

Many recovering dualists find that the old Cartesian demons are hard to exorcise. Dual substance abuse manifests itself not only as metaphysical dualism, but as a pervasive epistemological framework that creates an unhealthy codependent relationship between scientific realism and phenomenology. Daniel Dennett has led philosophers to recognize many of the symptoms of creeping crypto Cartesianism. In this paper, I try to take Dennett to the limit: Descartes lives on, I argue, in the very heart of cognitive science, in the (...) concept of representation. I outline a five-step program for overcoming this lingering, fundamental, allegiance to Cartesianism, and discuss Dennett's own progress along this path. (shrink)