Original title: The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis
The brain combines what it expects with what the senses report to infer what is happening. When the two disagree, that mismatch can drive learning. One idea is that psychosis happens when expectations count for too little compared with sensory signals, but studies do not all support that pattern. The review argues that expectations may work differently across senses and levels of processing, and that actions matter too.
Imagine carrying groceries home while deciding what to put in each bag. It is hard when you have to balance what you expect to fit against what the bags actually hold, and the best choice can change as you move things around. In this paper, the bags’ limits are the incoming sensory signals, your expectations guide what you make of them, and your actions can change what you sense.
Psychosis can involve experiences such as hallucinations and delusions, but a single explanation may not fit both. Understanding how expectations and sensory signals interact could help researchers build accounts that better reflect the different ways psychosis appears.
The abstract describes a review of current evidence and challenges, not a settled explanation of psychosis. It does not establish which predictive-coding changes cause hallucinations or delusions, or show that the proposed complexities resolve the conflicting findings. It also gives no specific study results or assessment of how well the account works in clinical practice.
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The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis — Philipp Sterzer, Rick A. Adams, Paul Charles Fletcher et al. — Biological Psychiatry — doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.05.015
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.