The computational anatomy of psychosis

Speaker: Professor Karl J. Friston, Institute of Neurology, UCL

Location

 Abstract: This talk considers formal or computational approaches to psychopathology. I will use schizophrenia to offer a case study of computational psychiatry. We first review the basic phenomenology and pathophysiological theories of schizophrenia. These motivate the choice of a formal or computational framework within which to understand the symptoms and signs of schizophrenia; particularly, in terms of false beliefs or inference. This framework is the Bayesian brain. We will focus on the (neuromodulatory) encoding of uncertainty or precision within predictive coding implementations of active inference - to demonstrate computational approaches to the nature and pathogenesis of hallucinations and delusions