Belief Lab

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The Belief, Learning & Memory Lab, directed by Prof. Phil Corlett, is an interdisciplinary, translational effort to map mind to brain, to understand cognition, perception, action, and belief.

The lab focuses on psychosis, in particular hallucinations (false percepts) and delusions (false beliefs).

These departures from consensual reality characterize serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, but they also exist on a continuum from health to illness.

Central to the lab’s efforts is the predictive processing account of mind and brain, which holds that minds and brains capture a hierarchical model of the world and the self as an agent in it.

We employ functional neuroimaging, behavioral learning and inference tasks, computational modeling and transcranial magnetic stimulation to formulate and test explanations of psychosis.

In this way, hallucinations and delusions, indeed almost all symptoms and processes, can be formalized in terms of prior beliefs, data processing and their relative precision.

The lab is committed to the idea that this predictive coding lens will revolutionize cognitive and clinical neuroscience, indeed, all decision making, and, in so doing, will carve new paths to optimizing human flourishing.