Cognitive science explains mind and brain in terms of computation, information-processing, and representationalism: the ability of a cognitive system to change internal microstructure so as to correspond with important features of the internal or external world. One could do worse than to sum up the cognitivist model of the mind as “computations over representations”, in [...]
Mental models of health professionals about patient symptom reports and “subjectivity”
Medicine has developed a pragmatic way to represent the verbal reports of patients within the context of diagnoses: for instance, patients report something about their experience; this is represented as a “symptom” on a “SOAP note” (Cutler, 1997): an acronym for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. Health professionals duly record what a patient says about [...]
more on the status of introspection in psychology and in neuroscience
An index of the status of introspection within psychology comes from Medin, Markman, and Ross (2004) in the textbook Cognitive Psychology, which notes (pg.20) that:
“Although introspection is not an infallible window to the mind, psychological research is leading to principles that suggest when verbal reports are likely to accurately reflect thinking“
These perspectives all can be [...]
Verbal report data: psychologists may be skeptical, but clinicians are more practical
Cognitive neuroscience and psychology needs to account for verbal report data from people about their body states. In perceptual psychology and psychophysics experiments, in cognitive studies of human problem-solving, in clinical trials of drug efficacy and safety, in phenomenological-psychological investigations into the thematics of body experience, researchers routinely ask subjects or patients to answer [...]
the legacy of Cartesian “objectivity” makes it hard to understand patient verbal reports
Psychiatrist Allan Beveridge (2002) hones in on a facet of the patient-physician relationship relevant to neurophenomenology: the over-adoption in medicine of the scientific attitude of objectivity towards phenomena. While entirely appropriate in the many research contexts, this may make understanding the personal body-knowledge of the patient more difficult (pg. 101):
“In the mental state examination, a [...]
symptom verbal reports and existential-physiological discrepancy
While the anatomical basis of how nerve projections enable perception of the body is rather well known, physicians confront situations where patient verbal reporting about symptoms does not match models based on neurophysiological mechanisms. For instance, the Merck Manual Medical Library (2009) states:
“Painful stimuli from thoracic organs can produce discomfort described as pressure, gas, burning, [...]
Jack and Roepstorff on introspection
From Trusting the Subject (2003), Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff write:
“The unique challenge facing a science of consciousness is that that the best instrument available for measuring experience depends on cognitive processes internal to the subject. So just how much faith can we place in the capacity of the mind to understand itself? In principle, [...]
