Imperfect Cognitions

This is our third of a series of posts in the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here  Rick Adams  summarises his paper (co-written with Harriet R. Brown and Karl J. Friston ) ' Bayesian Inference, Predictive Coding and Delusions '. I am in training to become a psychiatrist. I have also recently completed a PhD at UCL under Prof Karl Friston , a renowned computational neuroscientist. I am part of a new field known as Computational Psychiatry (CP). CP tries to explain how various phenomena in psychiatry could be understood in terms of brain computations (see also Corlett and Fletcher 2014 , Montague et al.,  2012 , and Adams et al. forthcoming in JNNP ). One phenomenon that ought to be amenable to a computational understanding is the formation of both ‘normal’ beliefs (i.e. beliefs which are generally agreed to be reasonable) and delusions. There are strong theoretical reasons to suppose that we (and other organisms) form beliefs in a Bayesi...