Thoughts without Thinkers

2018 ◽  
pp. 583-594
Author(s):  
Clara S. Humpston
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Diagnostic Significance ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Delusional Belief

Thought insertion is a puzzling psychotic phenomenon that is usually considered a delusional belief and has specific diagnostic significance for schizophrenia; this article examines the phenomenology of thought insertion in terms of the senses of agency and ownership over thought and also in relation to hallucinations as a spectrum of unusual experiences, and argues that thought insertion is first and foremost a near-sensory experience before any secondary delusion formation. It goes on to outline the paradoxical nature of thought insertion when considered as a delusion and offers a new line of inquiry which views it a duplex phenomenon combining a generative sensory experience with an explanatory delusional elaboration. The article posits that by investigating the two related yet distinct layers of the same phenomenon in question, we will be able to better understand the subjective experience of thought insertion.

Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Cantwell
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Book Culture

The iconic dimension of holy books has drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Iconic Books and Texts, James Watts, ed., London, Equinox, 2013). Asian Buddhism provides rich material for considering the ritualization of engagement with sacred texts. In Tibetan Buddhism, this aspect of book culture is perhaps especially pronounced (see, for instance, Schaeffer 2009, especially Chapter 6; Elliott, Diemberger and Clemente 2014). This paper explores the topic in relation to the engagement of the senses in Tibetan context, through seeing, touching, holding and tasting texts. It would seem that it is not the sensory experience in itself, but rather the physical experience of a transmission and incorporation of the sacred qualities from the books into the person which is emphasized in these practices. Parallels and contrasts with examples from elsewhere are mentioned, and there is some consideration of the breadth of the category of sacred books in the Tibetan context in which Dharma teachings may take many forms.

Senses of Vibration

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Trower
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Brain

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

scholarly journals Remembering Election Night 2016: Subjective but not objective metrics of autobiographical memory vary with political affiliation, affective valence, and surprise

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Sarah Chiew ◽  
Bailey Blume Harris ◽  
R. Alison Adcock
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Affective Valence ◽  
Subjective Memory ◽  
Information Quantity ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
Memory Confidence

Flashbulb memories represent a unique phenomenon linking research on cognition with research on emotion, yet most studies on this phenomenon have characterized collective events that are negative and unexpected in nature. In contrast, the 2016 American election of Donald Trump was a public, culturally-shared event, eliciting extreme emotional responses that were positive for some individuals but negative for others, as well as varying levels of surprise. We longitudinally evaluated autobiographical memories for Election Night 2016 in a large online sample of Clinton supporters, Trump supporters, and third-party/non-voters over a 12-month period, in terms of both objective memory metrics (information quantity and memory consistency) and subjective memory metrics (including memory confidence, metacognition, and sensory experience). Emotional responses to the election outcome varied widely, with Clinton supporters reporting highly negative responses, Trump supporters reporting highly positive responses, and third-party/non-voters reporting mildly negative responses. Emotional intensity was enhanced in surprised versus non-surprised individuals. Relative to third-party/non-voters, Clinton and Trump supporters reported greater memory vividness, event importance, and sensory experience. Additionally, memory confidence and rehearsal differed with valence (higher confidence in Trump supporters; higher memory rehearsal in Clinton supporters). These differences in subjective experience were observed despite similar levels of information quantity and consistency across groups. This characterization of memories for surprising positive events suggests they share many of the paradoxical qualities of memories for negative events often discussed as “flashbulb memories”, and further points to important potentially distinct features of memory phenomenology for collectively-experienced, relative to personal, events.

scholarly journals The configuration of happiness and unhappiness as part of the auditory landscape: the work of Albert Camus

Cahiers ERTA ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Sofia Chatzipetrou
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Symbolic Universe

This essay aims to analyze the poetics of the soundscape in Albert Camus’ work, based in the notions of happiness and unhappiness. Our purpose will be to define the characteristics of the symbolism of auditory perception, which are elaborated on the double configuration between happiness and unhappiness. The fact that the symbolic universe of Camus outlines a total sensory experience does no longer need to be demonstrated. Starting from his first lyrical writings to the Notebooks, his writing appeals arouses all the senses. Through a comparative study of examples relating to happiness and unhappiness and while underlining the predominant place of silence in Camus’ aesthetics, we will come off to the conclusion that Camus’s work constitutes a real kind of field recording.

Sensuous Experience, Performance, and Presence in Third Intermediate Period Biography

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Frood
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Intermediate Period ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Third Intermediate Period

This chapter analyses biographical motifs relating to sensory experience found in inscriptions largely belonging to one tenth-century bc priestly family in Thebes. The four statues which are the focus of discussion (CG 42225; CG 42226; CG 42227; CG 42228) were dedicated in the temple precinct of Karnak by Hor IX for himself, his ancestor, and his wife. Inscriptions on a statue of Horakhbit I (CG 42231) from Karnak are also treated. Celebration of the senses is found in these texts through the fusion of biography with themes known from harpists' songs, a genre previously associated with tombs; the use of myrrh, a pleasurable and ritual substance; and through phraseology that mobilises the sensuous geographies of sacred space. Study of how such motifs relate to other features of biography across the statues offers insights into transformations of more than one genre and developments in the function of statues in temples.

The Classification of Smells and the Order of the Senses in Indian Religious Traditions

Numen ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 374-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McHugh
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Senses

AbstractIn the course of producing complex analyses of sensory experience, traditional Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist scholars in South Asia examined the nature of smell. These scholars were most often interested in the fundamental qualities of smells, i.e. how many types of odor there are. Faced with this difficult task, the three sectarian groups initially produced three different accounts, though in later works most scholars adopted very similar classifications of smell. In part, this may be because of the difficulties involved in classifying smells, but the article also suggests that it was mutually beneficial to abandon contentious material in less significant parts of a system in order to focus discussion on more central issues. Amongst all the sense-objects, odors were most consistently defined by terms implying an aesthetic value. The article also examines the place of the sense of smell within the three different orders of the senses that these three schools of thought used. These sense-orders reflect divergent classificatory principles, and the place of smell in relation to the other senses highlights different aspects of the sense of smell. Unlike their stance on the classification of odors, the three schools of thought always maintained distinct orders of the senses, which must have been a regular reminder of difference in philosophical priorities.

scholarly journals Cotard syndrome, self-awareness, and I-concepts

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Rocco Joseph Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Previous Discussion ◽  
Delusional Belief ◽  
Conscious Mental State

Various psychopathologies of self-awareness, such as somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion in schizophrenia, might seem to threaten the viability of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness since it requires a HOT about one’s own mental state to accompany every conscious state. The HOT theory of consciousness says that what makes a mental state a conscious mental state is that there is a HOT to the effect that “I am in mental state M.” I have argued in previous work that a HOT theorist can adequately respond to this concern with respect to somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion. There is also Cotard syndrome which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In this paper, I argue that HOT theory has nothing to fear from it either and can consistently account for what happens in such unusual cases. I analyze Cotard syndrome in light of my previous discussion of somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion, and argue that HOT theory can provide a somewhat analogous account without the worry of inconsistency. It is crucial to recognize that there are multiple “self-concepts” and levels of HOTs which can help to provide a more nuanced explanation. With regard to the connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, it is proposed that Cotard patients are indeed capable of having some “I-thoughts” about their bodies and mental states.

Sensuous Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter S. Gershon
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Educational Studies ◽  
Sensory Studies

Education is a sensory experience. This is the case regardless how a sensorium is constructed. A sensorium is how a group defines, categorizes, and conceptualizes the senses, a Western five-senses model for example. Regardless of the sociocultural norms and values a sensorium engenders, animals, human and nonhuman alike, experience their lives through the senses. From this perspective, anything that might be considered educational, regardless of context and irrespective of questions of what might “count” as schooling, is a sensory experience. Sensuous curriculum sits at the intersection of two transdisciplinary fields, curriculum and sensory studies. As its name suggests, sensuous curriculum is an expression of ongoing critical educational studies of, with, and through the senses. In so doing, sensuous curriculum brings to the fore the extraordinary nature of everyday experiences in educational ecologies, from entangled sociocultural norms and values to the ways that sensory input and interpretation inform every aspect of educational ways of being, knowing, and doing. Sensoria have always been tools for understandings, particularly for continually marginalized groups whose claims are often dismissed through Western, Eurocentric framings. For the notion and instantiation of framings require both a set of universally understood constructs and their applications as well as the necessity of the act: when framing, someone or something is always framed. Providing critical tools for the interruption of such constructs and their use, sensuous curriculum is a rich site of study in ways that are theoretically and materially significant, while offering often underutilized trajectories for the exploration of educational understandings.

Our Body Is the Measure

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-74
Author(s):  
Colin Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Bodily Awareness ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

Malebranche holds that sensory experience represents the world from the body’s point of view. The chapter argues that Malebranche gives a systematic analysis of this bodily perspective in terms of the claim that the five external senses and bodily awareness represent nothing but relations to the body. The external senses represent relations between external objects and the perceiver’s body. Bodily awareness represents relations between parts of the perceiver’s body and her body as a whole, and the way she is related to her body. The senses thus represent the perceiver’s body as standing in two very different sets of relations. The external senses relate the body to a world of external objects, while bodily awareness relates this same body to the perceiver herself. The perceiver’s body, for Malebranche, is the center of the system of relations that make up her sensory world, bridging the gap between self and external objects.

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