Intruders in the Mind

Abstract Delusions of Thought Insertion (TI) are considered as one of the most complex psychotic experiences. More prevalent in schizophrenia, TI involves subjects reporting that entities of different nature have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. The particularity of this phenomenon is not that patients have been just caused to have certain unusual thoughts (in fact, this can happen all the time in everyday situations), rather, that certain thoughts are experienced as not being the patients’ but created and inserted by an external agent into their personal space. As such, TI confronts us with an enigmatic type of conscious experience where the boundaries between external and internal reality get blurred. In light of its unique features, over the last 20 years both clinicians and philosophers have found in TI a formidable challenge for the way in which consciousness, self–awareness, agency, the nature of beliefs, and a number of other critical concepts have been characterized in philosophy and cognitive sciences. Intruders in the Mind is an interdisciplinary attempt to bring together high–quality contributions to some of the most fundamental debates arising from the comprehensive study of TI. Making TI its central topic, this compilation gathers a series of essays that, taken as a whole, offer a broad and thoughtful approach to the clinical, phenomenological, conceptual, and experimental aspects of the systematic study of the phenomenon. The compilation is divided into 4 sections, each of them focusing on a specific set of interrelated debates.