Chapter 6 Looking at Our Minds

Phenomenology

is the philosophical study of experiences from the first-person point of view: we analyze the contents and structures of our consciousness. It is concerned with the proper description and understanding of experiences and how they are related to other experiences.

Introspection is a tool used in

phenomenology and phenomenology is a much wider philosophical approach than the use of that tool.

Farthing (1992) distinguished three types of introspection:

Analytic introspection, Descriptive (also known as phenomenological) introspection, Interpretive introspection

Analytic introspection

that attempts to describe our experience in terms of its constituents.

Descriptive (also known as phenomenological) introspection –

“what do I perceive, feel, or think?” Reports our immediate experience, one step removed from it.

Interpretive introspection

attempts to discover the causes of thoughts and feelings; not just what do I think, but why do I think it?

Limitations of introspection

1. Individuals can only describe what they can put into words and what they can

remember.

2. Individuals may reconstruct thoughts rather than describe them directly.

3. Individuals may censor what they report cannot be verified.

4. Individuals are influenced by many types of cognitive bias and distortion.

Cognitive Dissonance,

a social psychological concept, speaks to the difficulty of attributing correct explanations to our behavior.

Solipsism

is the philosophical doctrine that we can only be sure that the only thing that exists is our own mind.

Capgras Delusion (or syndrome)

is the delusional belief that a friend or family

member (often the person’s partner) has been replaced by impostors.

-          The impostors look identical, but the person refuses to acknowledge that they are the same. The person will attribute the impostor to the activity of the secret services, robots, clones, or even Martians.

-          It has been observed in people with brain injury, dementia, and schizophrenia, but is most commonly associated with parietal-lobe lesions.

-          Named after Joseph _______ (1873-1950), a French psychiatrist whose patient Madame M. claimed her husband and other loved ones had been replaced by doubles.

-          It is thought to be disorder of face processing; face processing disorders are known as prosopagnosia.

Fregoli Delusions

is another delusional disorder of person recognition in which people believe that two or more people are the same person in disguise, often persecuting the sufferer.

Capgras and Fregoli

delusions are types of delusional misidentification syndromes. Subjective doubles syndrome (where a person thinks that they have a double, or doppelganger, with different personality characteristics, who is leading their own life), and also inter-metamorphosis, where a person believes they can see another person changing into someone else.

Cotard’s delusion,

commonly known as the walking corpse syndrome, is even stranger: a person believes that they are already dead, or do not exist. There are less extreme versions where the person thinks they are missing a body part, or blood, or putrefying, or are dead but in heaven or hell. It is a severe delusion of negation, and appears to be related to severe depression or self-loathing.

Inkblot Personality Test

is the most commonly used projective personality test, where people’s emotions and hidden conflicts are revealed by their interpretation of ambiguous stimuli.

Collective Unconscious

Jung’s idea that a deep level of the unconscious contains material shared across people containing symbols called archetypes.,

Subliminal Perception

how what is outside consciousness might affect our consciousness without our realizing it, a process commonly known as