Affordances and the musically extended mind.

Journal ArticleThis article was submitted to Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.Copyright © 2014 Krueger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of "musicking" grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of "musical affordances" and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances - via soliciting different forms of entrainment - enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotion-granting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal character. I argue that music therefore ought to be thought of as part of the vehicle needed to realize these emotional experiences. I appeal to different sources of empirical work to develop this idea.Wellcome Trus

At Home in and Beyond Our Skin: Posthuman Embodiment in Film and Television

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328

Music as affective scaffolding

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available in print from Oxford University Press.For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture

Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this recordA family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. Despite much interest in this topic, however, it has not found its way to philosophy of psychiatry in a substantive way. I here consider how these “scaffolded” approaches to mind and self might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. First, I introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding”. I distinguish three forms of affective scaffolding and support this taxonomy by appealing to different sources of empirical work. Second, I put the idea of affective scaffolding to work. Using schizophrenia as a case study, I argue — along with others in phenomenological psychopathology — that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude that this way of thinking about the scaffolded self is potentially transformative both for our theoretical as well as practical understanding of the causes and character of schizophrenic experience, insofar as it suggests the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment

Musical scaffolding and the pleasure of sad music: Comment on “An Integrative Review of the Enjoyment of Sadness Associated with Music” by Tuomas Eerola et al.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.n/

James on Pure Experience

AcceptedThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Bloomsbury via http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/understanding-james-understanding-modernism-9781501302756/

Extended Emotions

ArticleUntil recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis (ExE). In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion (section 1). We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors (section 2). We conclude by defending ExE against some objections (section 3) and point to desiderata for future research (section 4).Thomas Szanto's work on this paper was generously supported by the European Union (EU) Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships research grant SHARE (655067): Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy

Mental institutions, habits of mind, and an extended approach to autism

This is the final version. Available on open access from QuiEdit vis the DOI in this recordWe argue that the notion of “mental institutions” – discussed in recent debates about extended cognition – can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just reside within an individual’s head). After providing some conceptual background, we discuss the connection between mental institutions and embodied habits of mind. We then discuss the significance of our view for understanding autistic habits of mind and consider why these embodied habits are sometimes a poor fit with neurotypical mental institutions. We conclude by considering how these insights highlight the two-way, extended nature of social impairments in autism, and how this extended picture might assist in constructing more inclusive mental institutions and intervention strategies

Losing Social Space: Phenomenological Disruptions of Spatiality and Embodiment in Moebius Syndrome and Schizophrenia

Social cognition and interpersonal relatedness are currently much-discussed topics in philosophy and cognitive science. Many of the debates focus on the causal mechanisms purportedly responsible for our ability to relate to and understand one another. When emotions and affectivity enter into these debates, they are generally portrayed as targets of social cognitive processes (i.e., as perceived in another person’s facial expressions, gestures, utterances, behavioural patterns, etc.) that must be interpreted or ‘decoded’ by the mechanisms in question. However, the role that emotions and affectivity play in facilitating interpersonal relatedness has not received the same level of attention. Nor has much thought been given to the spatiality of our interpersonal relations—that is, the common space in which we come together and engage with one another as social agents

Empathy Beyond the Head: Comment on “Music, Empathy, and Cultural Understanding” by E. Clarke et al.

Editorial Commen