Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité University Medicine and St. Hedwig Hospital, Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: martin.voss@charite.de.
2 papers in the library · 94 citations · publishing 2016-2021
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.
Self-disorders are increasingly seen as the root cause of schizophrenia, not merely a symptom. This aligns with philosophical views of an enactive self, formed through action and interaction. The authors analyze definitions of the self and evaluate computational theories, particularly Bayesian and predictive processing approaches, for modeling the active self. They assess the implementation and challenges of these models in computational psychiatry and cognitive developmental robotics. Embodied robotic systems are described as valuable tools for assessing, validating, and simulating mechanisms of self-disorders, especially those involving sensorimotor learning, prediction, and self-other distinction. This link offers insights into self-formation and new avenues for treating psychiatric disorders.