Hearing Voices And Other Matters Of The Mind

Author : Robert N. McCauley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190091150
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind written by Robert N. McCauley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

Author : Robert N. McCauley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190091169
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind written by Robert N. McCauley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

Author : Christopher C. H. Cook
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429750943
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine written by Christopher C. H. Cook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

Author : Robert Kolker
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385543778
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hidden Valley Road written by Robert Kolker and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Author : M. A. J. Romme
Publisher : Gwasg y Bwthyn
ISBN 13 : 9781906254223
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living with Voices written by M. A. J. Romme and published by Gwasg y Bwthyn. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the evidence to show it's possible to overcome problems with hearing voices and take back control of one's life.

Author : Simon McCarthy-Jones
Publisher : Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1784505412
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Can't You Hear Them? written by Simon McCarthy-Jones and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of 'hearing voices', once associated with lofty prophetic communications, has fallen low. Today, the experience is typically portrayed as an unambiguous harbinger of madness caused by a broken brain, an unbalanced mind, biology gone wild. Yet an alternative account, forged predominantly by people who hear voices themselves, argues that hearing voices is an understandable response to traumatic life-events. There is an urgent need to overcome the tensions between these two ways of understanding 'voice hearing'. Simon McCarthy-Jones considers neuroscience, genetics, religion, history, politics and not least the experiences of many voice hearers themselves. This enables him to challenge established and seemingly contradictory understandings and to create a joined-up explanation of voice hearing that is based on evidence rather than ideology.

Author : Claire Bien
Publisher : Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1784503223
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing Voices, Living Fully written by Claire Bien and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Claire Bien first began hearing voices, they were infrequent, benign and seemingly just curious about her life and the world around her. But the more attention Claire paid, the more frequently they began to speak, and the darker their intentions became... Despite escalating paranoia, an initial diagnosis of Schizophreniform Disorder and taking medication with debilitating side effects, Claire learned to face her demons and manage her condition without the need for long-term medication. In this gripping memoir, Claire recounts with eloquence her most troubled times. She explains how she managed to regain control over her mind and her life even while intermittently hearing voices, through self-guided and professional therapy and with the support of family and friends. Challenging a purely medical understanding of hearing voices, Claire advocates for an end to the stigma of those who experience auditory verbal hallucinations, and a change of thinking from the professionals who treat the condition.

Author : Charles Fernyhough
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465096816
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Voices Within written by Charles Fernyhough and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live immersed in thought. But do we actually know what a thought is? To answer this question, psychology professor Charles Fernyhough draws on everything from neuroscience to literary history to grasp the true nature of this most inscrutable of acts: thinking. Whether a medieval saint who hears voices or a writer absorbed in an imagined world, a daydreamer riding the subway or a captivated reader, we experience thought as a creative inner dialogue featuring multiple voices. Fernyhough uses this conception to demystify mental illness, showing that imagining voices is intimately linked to the feeling of artistic production. Drawing on literature, film, and psychology, as well as cognitive science, The Voices Within is a poetic venture into the depths of our mind. It will revolutionize the way we hear and understand the voices in our heads.

Author : Simon McCarthy-Jones
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107007224
Total Pages : 471 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing Voices written by Simon McCarthy-Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive exploration of the history, phenomenology, meanings and causes of hearing voices that others cannot hear (auditory verbal hallucinations).

Author : Robert N. McCauley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199341540
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not written by Robert N. McCauley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparison of the cognitive foundations of religion and science and an argument that religion is cognitively natural and that science is cognitively unnatural.