Limitations in the concept of normal cognitive functions in clinical

psychology
With the advent of scientific method came experimental psychology and opportunity of study
with measure all the problems about “mind” and psyche that belongs to philosophy in resent
and ancient past. Attention, language, consciousness, capacity of judgments, memory and
subtypes, perception, were exanimated, analyzed and study for the improvement of human
abilities in society. In the 21st century human engineering has been revolutionized and
improved cognitive and motor skills, the individual can solved complex problems now, is
economical productive, speaks many languages, is a professional and is a able to afford a
certain style of life.
In the periphery of this society of human improvement, there is a population of individuals
that are not economical productive, “that are morally corrupted”, or have cognitive
disabilities, and they are excluded to institutions for the sake of their rehab and upturn.
Philosophy, Psychological theories and cognitive sciences explain the problem with a
rhetoric full of euphemism, and try it to solve it with confinement and therapy for recovery
once lost abilities.

How we conceived abnormal cognition

Someone can lose his capacity of keep attention due to stress, or for medical or psychological
ethology, experiences difficulties to coordinate his motor skills by the same reasons, and it
happens with language, perception, memory and consciousness. Different pathologies and
psychological phenomena could affect in different levels these functions.
We perceive our reality through our senses, that’s have biological reasons, but we shaped
reality as a whole, according to personal experience, mood, animical dispositions, context
and neurological functions. When the cerebral cortex works in plenty of it conditions, we are
capable to perceive objects without problems and planning our intentions to these objects
without any intervention, apparently.
Genetic anomalies, systemic diseases or cerebral traumatism leads to a one or multiply
dysfunctions in higher cortical functions that compromise how sensorial information is
processes and conduct into motor activity. Nevertheless, there are conditions where the
person lost gradually the vision, language, sense of orientation, capacity of judgment, and
control of intentional movement. Aging, dementia, Alzheimer, Parkinsonism, strokes,
epilepsy, cranial encephalic traumatism, brain tumors, systemic diseases, all of this
pathology’s have an impact in whole brain structures and their effects can be describe as
symptoms in a specific disorder. In this part of the process is important to determine how
these persons form their reality and in what level this differ from how healthy people built
their reality.
Here is an example of a patient talking about his normal day. (The information was take in
March 21/2013):
Clinical overview:
 Diagnostic: Paranoid schizophrenia
 Age: unknown, 45 – 50 years
 Place of origin: Miskito, a minority ethnic group from Atlantic coast of Nicaragua
 More than a decade under anti – psychotic treatment
 More than a decade in psychiatric confinement without receiving visits from relatives

Nationality: Nicaraguan/from Atlantic Coast

“Today is Friday in USSR. We are in January of 1982. We have to take part in flight to
University of Kiev and study Marxism view of state. But they (the police) don´t let me get into
the plain; they have intentions to crush it. Germans are good people, not all Germans,
western Germans”

The “Irrational speech” as a vehicle to understand the mind

In the interview the patient was asked about his current day, he believe that still is in the early
eighties decade and that he is part of a convoy of students designated to flight from Nicaragua
to USRR. He doesn´t make eye contact when is telling his story, and is lying in bed, his
speech is slow and the tone of voice pretty low. He took his anti-psychotic medication 4
hours before the interview. The mental institution have not information about his past life.
This patient have fifth teen years under psychiatric confinement and has been treating with
pharmaco - therapy, he spends most of his time in bed, have not family or friends. According
to his tale, he speaks of things and objects that are not present in actual time, presumably he
spoken about early experiences as a student in Nicaragua under the Sandinista communist
regime in the eighties decade. The doctors in hospital though that the patient was victim of
torture by “local authorities”, but this is only a supposition, although very possible.
Schizophrenia as we know has a negative impact in various cognitive process, in the patient
speech, he felt an environment of hostility surrounding him, maintaining by an irrational
thinking of persecution and fear, although is not talking about unreal things and he
communicates in Spanish, which it´s not his native language. It can be assume that delusion
and desolation are the only reality that he knows, but there is a logic between lines in his
dialogue. Marxist government is a fact, persecution of minorities at that time too, and in
others interviews he makes use of a huge range of vocabulary about socialist theories. On the
other hand, after decades of reclusion and treatment with drugs is obvious that there is a local
damage in his brain (EEG has confirmed that hypothesis) that compromise his mind and
behavior.
Reality for him is not his immediate environment, instead of it, is an important traumatic past
experience or, a fictional remembrance with reliably relation with his life, transformed by
confabulation of memory. In fact, a disruption with reality is a primary symptom of psychotic
states. This is the other population of “mental illness subjects” that are recognized and
treating as different because they perceived and created they own thinking as result of a
“deformation of reality”.
Scholars, mental health specialist and philosophers have created this distinction as Michel
Foucault says in “madness and civilization”, in order to save the society of reason, for that
reason the scholar thought choose to separate “abnormal” first in theories, and later with
“confinement” in institutions of rehabilitations. Institutions of power articulated with
“scientific medical achievements” harm the mental ill population imposing a treatment as a
life style and reducing his expressions as a symptom only.
Why the medical staff and I, were different from that person called a “patient with mind
problems and cognitive impairments? It was because we were specialists with theories that
can explain his “abnormal state?”

Conclusion
Descartes says in Meditation III that reality and objects can´t be explain as separate things
also he says that ideas are things. In cognitive sciences, this philosophical quote is a primary
source of investigation, we are what we perceived, and we are our beliefs. Ideas could be
more than isolated thing, and become a whole reality for a single person. We can learn more
about human mind condition not only making diagnostic, instead, we could explain these
conditions in more dimensional aspects; trying to move the speech into the elements of
reality, in the end, not single “Irrational person” talk only about unreal things, they use a
common language, talk with real words about some kind of objects and situations. There is
someone still behind the delusions and cognitive dysfunction.
There is a medical explanation for understand these conditions in plenty of cases, but I
believe that society is responsible for many of these so called “dysfunctions”, excluding and
reducing our human abilities as a recyclable product, one time we are no longer functional to
a purpose. We live in a century of minorities, every group feel excluded, oppressed and
forbidden, but there are no minorities in groups, only in the individual. Those who live their
life in an isolated room, they are the minority, and they need someone to talk for them,
because we excluded them in the past, with our theories, because there is a “Genetic cause”
for abnormal behavior. A society of stress needs a neurophysiological theory for mental
pathology in order to preserve all his power and remain innocent.