Marco Bernini

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: (1) cultural, social, and historical; (2) experiential; and (3) biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include (1) informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; (2) “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and (3) suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.

Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences

Highlights • Vivid experiences of characters implicate simulation processes during reading.• Reading imagery is related to features of inner speech and hallucination-proneness.• Qualitative analysis highlights involuntary experiences of characters and voices.

Introspection, isolation, and construction: mentality as activity. Commentary on Hurlburt, Heavey & Kelsey (2013). "Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking".

The authors are supported by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, ‘‘Hearing the Voice’’, WT098455.

The Opacity of Fictional Minds: Transparency, Interpretive Cognition and the Exceptionality Thesis

Within cognitive science and narrative theory, the ‘transparency of the mind’ is a shared optical image to describe the accessibility of cognitive processes and phenomenological experiences. This seeming terminological convergence, however, conceals important differences and potential confusion about what is transparent to whom, or what higher or lower degrees of transparency imply in terms of accessibility. Cognitive science speaks of a transparency of the mind in at least two kinds of cognitive scenarios. One is the so-called transparency of self-knowledge or self-transparency (T1), according to which the mind is said to be transparent to itself. A second condition of transparency is in relation to outward perceptual experiences where, inversely, transparency indicates the introspective inaccessibility of phenomenal states or their ‘phenomenal transparency’ (T2). When looking at the colour blue, the classic example goes, we can just attend to the colour blue and not to the experience itself because we see through the process channelling that experience. Both assumptions have been recently disputed or substantially revisited by new strands in cognitive science, which advocate that perception and self-knowledge are instead inherently opaque. Within this alternative account of the mind, encompassing a range of perspectives that the chapter will group and present as the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, transparency is considered just an illusory feeling resulting from the positive outcome of successful interpretive mechanisms coping with a vast array of opaque stimuli in inner cognition and outward perception. Drawing on the hypotheses raised by the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, and especially on its reappraisal of inner transparency (T1), this chapter aims at addressing, refining and reassessing an equally recent debate in narrative theory about the transparency of fictional minds. With a particular focus on moods and introspective opacity (conditions in which the embodied, anti-Cartesian dimension of cognition is particularly relevant), the chapter uses Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) as a case study to show how narrative fiction can transparently bring interpretive processes to the fore, either when this mediation is unperceived by the experiencing character or when opacity becomes perceptible to her.

Crawling Creating Creatures: On Beckett’s liminal minds

The continuity and contiguity between animal and human beings in Beckett’s work has been the subject of sustained critical attention. The recurring dehumanisation or degeneration of his characters’ mental faculties and behaviours has largely been analysed as an ‘ostensible animalization’ of human nature – following a reading of the ‘creaturely’ spectrum as a regression from the human to the animal. In contrast, this article considers the creaturely level in Beckett’s narrative as occupied by undeveloped human cognisers as opposed to (and sometimes rancorously opposing) fully fledged Humans. If Beckett’s formal minimalism has been extensively foregrounded, this essay draws on contemporary cognitive science and phenomenology in order to define and examine what the author calls Beckett’s cognitive liminalism – his literary exploration of liminal states of cognition and experience, of which the concept of the ‘creature’ constitutes a foundational element.

Norman Holland, Literature and the Brain

Per quanto sia possibile prendere visione e coscienza anche dall’Italia, in traduzione, del “cognitive turn” che ha coinvolto negli ultimi vent’anni discipline come la filosofia della mente, la psicologia e la piu recente fenomenologia di stampo per lo piu statunitense e anglosassone, lo stesso non puo dirsi per gli approcci cognitivi alla letteratura e ad altre arti. Tralasciando meriti e demeriti di una simile lacuna editoriale, un’ipotetica traduzione italiana dell’ultimo lavoro di Norman Holland porterebbe con se una notevole tracciatura bibliografica di questa svolta interdisciplinare negli studi letterari e non solo.