Maher, for example, saw delusions as efforts to make sense of striking and anomalous perceptual experiences: “The locus of the pathology is in the neuropsychology of experience” ( Maher, 1999). Later theorists have also linked delusions to experiential abnormalities. According to Southard (1916), the woman had a medical condition (softening of the cranial bones) that produced misleading perceptual data, “poisoned at the sensory source” (p. A young female patient admitted to the State Lunatic Asylum at Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1879 complained of noises in her head and expressed the belief that she had live bees in her skull. The notion that delusions stem from errant percepts has a long history. 1 It has been suggested instead that humans keep communication mostly reliable thanks to cognitive mechanisms that evaluate communicated information, rejecting unreliable signals and lowering our trust in their senders-mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. In humans, however, essentially no communication has this property. In some species, the signals are produced in such a way that it is simply impossible to send unreliable signals-for instance, if the signal can be produced only by large or fit individuals (see, e.g., Maynard Smith & Harper, 2003). As a result, for communication to remain stable, there must exist some mechanism that keeps signals, on average, reliable. However, senders often have incentives to send signals that benefit themselves but not the receivers. For communication between any organisms to be stable, it must benefit both those who send the signals (who would otherwise refrain from sending them) and those who receive them (who would otherwise evolve to ignore them). The existence of these mechanisms has been postulated on the basis of the theory of the evolution of communication (e.g., Maynard Smith & Harper, 2003 Scott-Phillips, 2008). Epistemic VigilanceĪ set of putative cognitive mechanisms serves a function of epistemic vigilance: to evaluate communicated information so as to accept reliable information and reject unreliable information ( Sperber et al., 2010). Here we attempt to illuminate this conundrum by drawing on the literature on epistemic vigilance. Among other puzzles is an apparent paradox concerning the way patients with delusions respond to evidence ( Furl et al., in press): Deluded individuals seem to display both excessive credulity (being too willing to adopt unusual beliefs on minimal evidence) and excessive rigidity (being unwilling to relinquish them in the face of strong counterevidence). Delusions are distressing to patients and their families and perplexing to clinicians and theoreticians. Examples of delusions include the belief that one’s daily life is being recorded for national broadcast ( Gold & Gold, 2012), that one’s genitals have been stolen and replaced with someone else’s ( Connors & Lehmann-Waldau, 2018), and that the COVID-19 pandemic will precipitate a zombie apocalypse ( Ovejero et al., 2020). All subjects Allied Health Cardiology & Cardiovascular Medicine Dentistry Emergency Medicine & Critical Care Endocrinology & Metabolism Environmental Science General Medicine Geriatrics Infectious Diseases Medico-legal Neurology Nursing Nutrition Obstetrics & Gynecology Oncology Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine Otolaryngology Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care Pediatrics Pharmacology & Toxicology Psychiatry & Psychology Public Health Pulmonary & Respiratory Medicine Radiology Research Methods & Evaluation Rheumatology Surgery Tropical Medicine Veterinary Medicine Cell Biology Clinical Biochemistry Environmental Science Life Sciences Neuroscience Pharmacology & Toxicology Biomedical Engineering Engineering & Computing Environmental Engineering Materials Science Anthropology & Archaeology Communication & Media Studies Criminology & Criminal Justice Cultural Studies Economics & Development Education Environmental Studies Ethnic Studies Family Studies Gender Studies Geography Gerontology & Aging Group Studies History Information Science Interpersonal Violence Language & Linguistics Law Management & Organization Studies Marketing & Hospitality Music Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution Philosophy Politics & International Relations Psychoanalysis Psychology & Counseling Public Administration Regional Studies Religion Research Methods & Evaluation Science & Society Studies Social Work & Social Policy Sociology Special Education Urban Studies & Planning BROWSE JOURNALSĭelusions are unjustified and often bizarre beliefs that are symptomatic of numerous psychiatric and neurological disorders ( Coltheart et al., 2011).
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