Loving the Alien

The alien hand syndrome: What makes the alien hand alien?

The alien hand syndrome is a deeply puzzling phenomenon in which brain-damaged patients experience their limb performing seemingly purposeful acts without their intention. Furthermore, the limb may interfere with the actions of their normal limb. We report a case of alien hand syndrome following a left medial frontal and corpus callosum ischemic lesion. From our clinical observations and the pa...

The ethics of loving care.

DNA or loving care?

to five contestants might be involved in child-custody conflicts. As cases of ART in which third parties are involved become more common, the issue of what constitutes a parent is now, perhaps more than ever, highly contested. There is no consensus on what parents are or what they should be. At the heart of the issue are at least two important questions. First, what is the relative importance a...

Loving-kindness brings loving-kindness: the impact of Buddhism on cognitive self-other integration.

Common wisdom has it that Buddhism enhances compassion and self-other integration. We put this assumption to empirical test by comparing practicing Taiwanese Buddhists with well-matched atheists. Buddhists showed more evidence of self-other integration in the social Simon task, which assesses the degree to which people co-represent the actions of a coactor. This suggests that self-other integra...

Phenomenology and delusions: who put the 'alien' in alien control?

Although current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusions are based on unusual experiences, they differ in the role that they accord experience in the formation of delusions. On some accounts, the experience comprises the very content of the delusion, whereas on other accounts the delusion is adopted in an attempt to explain an unusual experience. We call these the endorsement an...