Do You Have Sub Dimenta?

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Elly: My mother had a sense for a while things were starting to slip away, and she was trying to kind of hang on to em. She would get really upset if we told her she was wrong, because she thought, well, do you think i'm crazy? That's what she was say. And maybe it's an illusion, like free will, an agency, but, you know, it's a powerful illusion. It works. I love William james' book 18 90 which is about the principles of psychology. There are all these various ways of defining the self, imean says.

Shermer and Arikha discuss: what it means for a mind to be disrupted • dementia, senility, and Alzheimer’s disease • mental illness and the labeling problem • the social construction of mental illness • neurology and psychiatry • agency and volition • memory and amnesia • autobiographical memory • self and embodied self • brain modularity • brain as a machine • emotions and cognition: bodily changes first then the awareness of the emotion • conversion disorder/hysteria • depression • metacognition: thinking about thinking • exteroception and interoception.

Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. The author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, she is associate fellow of the Warburg Institute and honorary fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings, London, and research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. She is based in Florence, Italy.