The Root Cause of Strange Beliefs

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Sally Kohn says strange beliefs are philosophical conundrum, but it's also a cultural phenomenon. To one culture, the patient presente with symptoms, looks like witchcraft. To another culture, t looks like demon possession. But if you actually want to treat the patient, burning women as witches or performing an exorcism is not going to be as effective as giving the patient some medical treatment,. i'm afraid.

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.