Understanding Attention as a Brain Process Using Biased Competition Model and Visual Psychophysics

No data was used for the manuscript. However, Structured Mind by Sebastian Watzl was notably used for the manuscript.

Understanding Attention as a Brain Process Using Biased Competition Model and Visual Psychophysics

No data was used for the manuscript. However, Structured Mind by Sebastian Watzl was notably used for the manuscript.

Evaluative Emotions

This chapter outlines a theory of the emotions intended to accommodate both traditional philosophical conceptions of emotions as cognitively inflected evaluative appraisals and more recent empirical approaches that highlight their subdoxastic dimensions. Here some empirical evidence is introduced to demonstrate that affective mechanisms of the mind and brain process the contents of imaginings in ways that are parallel to how they process the contents of beliefs and other veridical representations. This chapter then shows how the general theory of the emotions oriented toward objects of belief and perception must be modified and supplemented to account for (i) the particular kinds of emotions elicited in the imaginative experiences elicited by works of art; and (ii) certain asymmetries in the conditions under which fiction-directed and real-world-directed emotions are formed.

Against the stream: Antidepressants are not antidepressants – an alternative approach to drug action and implications for the use of antidepressants

SummaryAlthough antidepressants are regarded as effective and specific treatments, they are barely superior to placebo in randomised trials, and differences are unlikely to be clinically relevant. The conventional disease-centred understanding of drug action regards antidepressants as targeting an underlying brain process, but an alternative ‘drug-centred’ view suggests they are psychoactive substances that modify normal mental states and behaviour. These alterations, such as numbing of emotions, may reduce feelings of depression, and also create amplified placebo effects in randomised trials. Patients should be informed that there is no evidence that antidepressants work by correcting a chemical imbalance, that antidepressants have mind-altering effects, and that evidence suggests they produce no noticeable benefit compared with placebo.Declaration of interestThe author is co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network.

Processes of what models?

In a recent article, Chesterman (2013) elaborates on Toury’s (2012) distinction between ‘translation acts’ (cognitive process) and ‘translation events’ (sociological process), and adds a third, superordinate level of ‘translation practices’ (cultural, historical, anthropological). Such successively nested models seem intuitively correct when applied to categorizing different approaches within translation studies. However, when used within cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches, such categories are found to lead to flawed reasoning. When Chesterman’s proposal is considered from perspectives such as the level of abstraction and the dynamicity of the models, many examples provided as illustration turn out to be misleading. The bulk of such errors points to an implicit notion of cognition which is contested by a growing number of researchers within translation process research: a view of thought as an internal, neutral, and logical brain process, mainly focused on problem-solving.