Ben Alderson-Day – författare

Voice-hearing experiences associated with psychosis are highly varied, frequently distressing, poorly understood, and deeply stigmatised, even within mental health settings. Voices in Psychosis responds to the urgent need for new ways of listening to and making sense of these experiences. It brings multiple disciplinary, clinical, and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who hear voices and who have accessed Early Intervention in Psychosis services.The book addresses the social, clinical, and research contexts in which the interviews took place, thoroughly investigating the embodied, multisensory, affective, linguistic, spatial, and relational qualities of voice-hearing experiences. The nature, politics, and consequences of these analytic endeavours is a focus of critical reflection throughout. Each chapter gives a multifaceted insight into the experiences of voice-hearers in the North East of England and to their wider resonance in contexts ranging from medieval mysticism to Amazonian shamanism, from the nineteenth-century novel to the twenty-first century survivor movement.By deepening and extending our understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way, the book will be an invaluable resource not only for academics in the field, but for mental health practitioners and members of the voice-hearing community.An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.

Dreams have been fascinating multiple disciplines for centuries, from philosophy and literature to contemporary cognitive science. Why we dream remains an enduring mystery, but cognitive research on dream has experienced a new wave of interest in recent years. Breakthroughs in the experimental study of dreaming are provoking multiple questions about the experiential qualities of dreams and the potential insights they might disclose for larger issues such as consciousness, the self, and our relationship with reality. How does our enactive and cognitive experience of reality permeate into dreams, and vice-versa? What makes dreams immersive and world-like experiences?? And are dreams narrative experiences, or experiences that we only later narrativize?Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition answers these questions with an interdisciplinary framework encompassing not just the psychological sciences but the full breadth of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Driven by the interdisciplinary project, Threshold Worlds, based at Durham University in the autumn of 2020, this volume combines multiple methodologies to chart a more systematic landscape of dream-worlds. This includes co-constructing exploratory models, experimental designs, and phenomenological enquiries, as well as the collaborative interpretation of existing data from dream reports. It covers the themes of narrativity, permeability, immersivity, and reportability through original and interdisciplinary contributions from cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, narrative theorists, philosophers of mind, theologians, and artists.Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of this work are available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. These parts of the work are free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

In this enthralling book, Ben Alderson-Day explores one of the most curious experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing sense that someone or something is there when we are alone – the feeling of an unseen presence.When and why do presences emerge? What does this feeling mean and where does it come from? And how can we even begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it and yet so hard to put into words? The answers to these questions lie in this fascinating exploration through cutting-edge research in contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and philosophy.Taking the reader on a riveting and emotional journey, Presence offers remarkable insights into the experience of felt presence and how it relates to a range of medical conditions, including sleep paralysis, dementia and Parkinson’s. This compelling story will stoke the fascination of sceptics and ardent believers alike who are drawn to the mystery of the unseen.