The Role of Perception in Mental Health

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I don't go so far as Thomas Saws and Foucault, you know, that it's an invention of Western civilization. I just think we got a ways to go. And for all the money, kind of throwing at those sorts of things, if you want to solve mental health, you could tackle poverty in some way that might help too. This is what I tell the mind uploaders and the cryonics people and all that stuff. Don't you want to live a thousand years? Like, look, just solve Alzheimer's. Just solve that one.

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.