Computational Model Quotes

“Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli.”
― Andreas Heinz

“What apparently started as a loosening of semantic context, which allowed the patient to make a witty play with words about pyramids and 'extrapyramidal' disorders, completely lost its humorous character when the patient experienced the profound anxieties and cognitive impairments associated with a severe psychotic crisis. Experiencing the lack of precision of higher-order concepts, in this case clear distinction between pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in the brain, can thus be a curse and blessing at the same time: it allows us to detect the fundamental imprecision of language and the shaky metaphorical ground on which common concepts about ourselves and the world are based, and this experience can lead to a state of exhilaration about the fundamental nonsense of the world, the nonexistence of our assumed securities, and the shallowness of cherished beliefs, but it also confronts us with overwhelming complexity and threatening insecurity and throws us in deep anxious turmoil when confronted with the sheer chaos of being.”
― Andreas Heinz, A New Understanding of Mental Disorders: Computational Models for Dimensional Psychiatry