"'THE syndrome has its philosophical basis not in specific disease factors but in a chain of physiological processes, interference of which at any point produces the same impairment of bodily function. The same syndrome may thus arise from many different causes. This newer view inspires a far more catholic concept of xetiology and renders pointless many existing controversies." SIR HAROLD HIMSW...

Diagnosis: a judgment about what a particular illness or problem is, made after making an examination. [Cambridge Dictionaries Online. Diagnosis. Cambridge University Press 2011. Accessed February 17, 2012. http:// dictionary.cambridge.org.] Diagnose (to): to recognize and name the exact character of a disease or a problem, by making an examination. [Cambridge Dictionaries Online. Diagnose. Cam...

INTRODUCTION Different types of confabulation or false memory can arise from brain disease. There are competing explanatory theories for the mechanisms underlying confabulation. Recent literature has attempted to relate the notion of delusion to that of confabulation. METHOD A brief review of the literature relating to these ideas. RESULTS The varieties of confabulation or false memory that...

In this paper I discuss the role played by disturbed phenomenology in accounting for the formation and maintenance of the Capgras delusion. Whilst endorsing a two-stage model to explain the condition, I nevertheless argue that traditional accounts prioritise the role played by some form of second-stage cognitive disruption at the expense of the significant contribution made by the patient's dis...

3 This paper considers the consequences of endowing an intelligent agent with the ability to modify its own code. The intelligent agent is patterned closely after AIXI with these specific assumptions: 1) The agent is allowed to arbitrarily modify its own inputs if it so chooses; 2) The agent’s code is a part of the environment and may be read and written by the environment. The first of these w...

Background: Most dermatologic and psychiatric providers are familiar with the entity of delusional infestation (DI). DI involves the fixed, false belief that one is infested with animate or inanimate matter and is associated with abnormal cutaneous symptoms such as biting or crawling, in the absence of any objective evidence. Although DI is more commonly encountered and discussed in the psychod...