Dear all, Stupidly I didn't note either the date orthe place for this talk in the previous email. It will take place this Thursday (the 16th) from *12.30-2pm* in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room.
Professor Paul Fletcher will be talking on "Rethinking schizophrenia within a predictive coding framework" (abstract below). Paul works in the psychiatry department here, and has made seminal contributions to the study of psychosis (http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?pcf22). Feel free to bring your lunch. I hope to see many of you there! Dan. Abstract: Schizophrenia, for a long time one of the core diagnostic categories within psychiatry, has come in for increasing criticism, mainly because the loose grouping of symptoms, perceptions, inferences and experiences which it describes are neither specific nor consistent. Another major weakness of schizophrenia and psychiatric classifications more generally lies in the lack of any credible understanding of the mechanisms by which mental symptoms arise. (This is perhaps understandable given that we don't know how mental states arise). I suggest that the emergence of predictive coding models, based around old ideas of the brain as a predictive organ attempting to generate models of its world, offers us fresh ways of thinking about schizophrenia and mental illness in general. This perspective consider the core symptoms - delusions and hallucination - in terms of normal perceptual and inferential processes and considers how they might emerge as a consequence of (potentially subtle) alterations of balance between experience-based prediction and current sensory input. I draw attention to the many possible ways in which the system may be perturbed and, thus, the many possible routes through which sub-optimal mental models of the world may arise. -- Daniel Williams PhD Candidate in Philosophy Email: [email protected] Trinity Hall, Cambridge -- Daniel Williams PhD Candidate in Philosophy Email: [email protected] Trinity Hall, Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
