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SUMMARY:Outstanding Puzzles for Predictive Coding Explanations of Delusion
 s - Juliet Griffin\, Department of Psychiatry
DTSTART:20170209T131000Z
DTEND:20170209T140000Z
UID:TALK71002@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:KC Sivaramakrishnan
DESCRIPTION:One of the most exciting breakthroughs in recent cognitive sci
 ence has been its newfound recognition of a fundamental organising princip
 le of cognition: namely\, that the brain is fundamentally in the business 
 of inferring what’s going on around it\, by predicting its own sensory i
 nputs. At all scales of neural processing\, a wealth of top-down prior exp
 ectations are brought to bear on inferentially ‘explaining away’ the p
 attern of bottom-up activity. Bayes’ theorem gives us a mathematical rul
 e for optimising inference\, by combining prior knowledge with new informa
 tion according to the relative reliability of each – and dopamine gives 
 us a neurochemical mechanism by which this relative reliability is coded.\
 n\nDisturbances to dopamine-mediated predictive coding may cause psychosis
  – a condition in which the individual becomes trapped in a prison of th
 eir brain’s own inferences\, which have somehow become unyoked from exte
 rnal reality. But since predictive coding theories of psychosis appeal to 
 a pervasive dysfunction in a general\, overarching principle of cognition\
 , they struggle to account for the surprising regularity with which certai
 n highly-specific themes and features crop up again and again in the pheno
 menological content of psychotic experience. I will describe the many expl
 anatory successes of predictive coding theories of psychosis\, before disc
 ussing how my own research attempts to tackle the pressing challenges they
  still face in accounting for the facts that delusions overwhelmingly tend
  to be unpleasant\, social\, and bizarre.\n\nBio: I studied Natural Scienc
 es at Cambridge\, specialising in Experimental Psychology for my BA in 201
 3 and completing the MSci in History and Philosophy of Science the followi
 ng year. In 2014 I applied to do a PhD investigating the development of ps
 ychotic symptoms (particularly delusions) in the context of schizophrenic 
 illness. I received funding from the Wellcome Trust NeuroScience in Psychi
 atry Network\, and started my PhD later that year under the supervision of
  Prof Paul Fletcher and Dr Graham Murray.
LOCATION:The Richard King Room\, Darwin College
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