Thought insertion as a self-disturbance: An integration of predictive coding and phenomenological approaches
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience December 22, 2016 Philipp Sterzer, Aaron Mishara, Martin Voss et al. 78 citations
Thought insertion in schizophrenia may arise from altered Bayesian inference within the predictive coding framework. Early 20th-century phenomenological accounts by the Heidelberg School described thought insertion as a self-disturbance involving disrupted inner connectedness of thoughts, which become sensory and feel inserted. Mescaline was used as a model psychosis to explore these mechanisms. The authors propose that reduced precision of context-dependent predictions, relative to sensory precision, increases prediction-error signals for internal events like thoughts. This aberrant salience, analogous to that proposed for external events, leads individuals to interpret thoughts as inserted by an alien agent, similar to delusion formation from aberrant sensory salience.