Teaching and courses 

Dr Braithwaite teaches a 3rd year undergraduate module examining Hallucinations and Delusions in the normal, clinical and pathological population.

The course critically reviews a broad ranging and interdisciplinary set of findings from Neuropsychology, Clinical Psychology, Clinical Neuropsychiatry, to Cognitive Psychology, Neuroscience (including brain-imaging), Anomalous Cognition, and examines the scientific accounts proposed by these disciplines for these striking and fascinating experiences.

Some example cases include:

  • The relationship between neural disinhibition and aura experiences, hallucinations peculiar to Migraine and Epilepsy
  • The Charles-Bonnet Syndrome
  • Hallucinations and delusions in Schizophrenia
  • The concept of Schizotypy and the ‘Healthy Schizotype’
  • Deficits in reality-monitoring
  • Deficits in self-monitoring
  • Body-image distortions and hallucinations of the self
  • The ‘rubber-hand’ illusion and its implications for self-awareness and disorders of embodiment
  • Phantom-limb syndrome
  • Alien-hand syndrome
  • Capgras Syndrome
  • Fregoli delusion
  • Cotard delusion
  • False-memory / false beliefs
  • Deficits in causal reasoning
  • Deja-vu / jamais-vu experiences
  • The “jump-to-conclusion” bias and its relationship to delusion formation in the normal population
  • Autoscopic hallucination
  • Depersonalization disorder
  • Out-of-body experiences / near-death experiences
  • The ‘sensed-presence’ hallucination (apparitions)
  • Hallucinations and delusions relating to Hyper-religiosity / Hyper-spirituality {the God spot and the brain}
  • Paranormal belief as a delusion in the normal population

It asks questions such as:

  • Just how and why do palpably untrue experiences and beliefs appear so real and so convincing?
  • What implications do these instances have for mainstream accounts of brain function, and conversely, what implications do contemporary models of neurocognition have for these bizarre instances?
  • Do these experiences really lie on a continuum of hallucinatory / delusory proneness from normal observers to patients?
  • If so, to what extent is stable perception itself a form of controlled hallucination?
  • Are we all capable of hallucination and delusion – and if so what does this tell us?
  • How does the brain decide what counts as reality - and what happens when this process goes wrong?