DOPPELGANGER: Doubles in psychiatry, neurology and fiction.

About this episode

The episode explores the concept of doubles in psychiatry, neurology, and literature, discussing their implications for understanding the self.

In this extraordinarily wide ranging podcast, we talk about doubles from the point of view of psychopathology, neuroscience, and what they tell us about the nature of self. Our neuroscience discussion includes the work of Head, Schilder, Damasio (around the idea of body schema/representations in the brain and their implication - a kind of neural double) followed by a fascinating deviation into Melzak's exploration of the phantom limb and the 'neural matrix' that may underlie it. Our 'double in literature' chat ranges from Euripides over 2 millenia ago to Patrick McGrath's 1999 novel 'Spider' by way of a Scottish gothic tale from 1824. Femi gives an overview of Alfred Hitchcock's double-obsessed oeuvre before discussing the Wachowski brother's 'Matrix' (1999), a kind of thought experiment on the nature of the self, detached from the brain. We end with an 'out of hours' chat about clinical cases. Brainland was created as a platform for this type of terrific conversation. Participants: Oluwafemi (Femi) Oyebode, Honorary Prof of Psychiatry, University of Birmingham, UK https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/clinical-sciences/oyebode-femi Ken Barrett is an artist, writer and…

People in this episode

Host: Ken Barrett

Guest: Oluwafemi (Femi) Oyebode

Topics covered

• psychopathology
• neuroscience
• nature of self
• literature
• clinical cases
• phantom limb
• neural matrix

Keywords

• doubles
• psychopathology
• neuroscience
• literature
• phantom limb
• neural matrix
• self
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Matrix
• Doppelganger

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Birmingham, Cambridge Bookshop

Books & works: Doppelganger, Spider, Matrix, Private memoires and confessions of a justified sinner

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