The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series presents:

Friday, December 1
4pm
Oak 109

Phil Corlett, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University will present a lecture on:

Psychosis as a window on perception and belief

Psychosis has many causes but is generally defined in terms of conscious experiences of the world, and of oneself, that deviate appreciably from consensual reality. It may be useful to break it down into its component symptoms of anomalous perceptions (“hallucinations”) and bizarre and inexplicable beliefs (“delusions”). A major challenge in developing a comprehensive and coherent understanding of psychosis is to characterize the nature of disturbances that may give rise both to a profoundly altered experience and understanding of the world and to an impairment in one’s capacity to sample and use evidence in order to optimize inferences. I will argue that these symptoms both entail devising a world model that accounts for one’s reality. I will explore the degree to which developing our understanding of the brain as a predictive inference device can provide a powerful explanatory framework within which to understand the disruptions in conscious experience of the world that characterize psychosis, from fundamental and pervasive perturbations in interoception, exteroception, self perception to wider disruptions in how one infers the contents of other minds. Moreover, by refining our understanding of how these disturbances may occur, we gain valuable insights to how the brain generates our experiences more generally.

 

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