Date: Friday 13rd December
Time: 11 am
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Title: “Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and the Anticipatory
Nature of Experience”
Abstract: My aim is to formulate an account of auditory-verbal hallucinations
(AVHs) occurring in the context of schizophrenia, which is both informed by
empirical findings and does justice to the subjective experience of
voice-hearing. I argue that AVHs cannot be fully understood in isolation from
their broader experiential context. They are symptomatic of global experiential
changes, and any complete account of them needs to understand these changes. I
start by attempting to formulate a clearer statement of what is involved,
phenomenologically speaking, by looking closely at first-person patient
reports. I then explain these phenomenological changes in terms of recent work
on “hierarchical predictive processing” (HPP) (see Clark 2013, for a review). I
present data suggesting that schizophrenia involves predictive processing going
wrong. I then show how this predictive processing view supports a recent
distinction between “inner speech hallucinations”, which occur in quiet
contexts where attention is inwardly directed, and “hypervigilance
hallucinations”, which occur in loud contexts where attention is outwardly
directed (Dogdson and Gordon 2009).
