What can hallucinations and delusions tell us about how the brain constructs reality? Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Philipp Sterzer examines psychosis through the lens of predictive processing.

Predictive processing describes perception as an active process: the brain generates predictions about the world, compares them with incoming sensory information, and updates its internal models when the two do not match. But what happens when these inferential processes change?

In this conversation, course author Dr. Fabian Mueller speaks with Prof. Dr. med. Philipp Sterzer, Professor of Translational Psychiatry at the University of Basel and Chief Physician at the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK). Drawing on research at the intersection of psychiatry, neuroscience, and computational modelling, Sterzer discusses how predictive processing can help us understand hallucinations, delusions, and psychosis.

The conversation also explores the limits of the framework. Are hallucinations better explained by priors that are too weak or too strong? How can computational models help distinguish between competing explanations? And what would we need to know about their implementation in the brain before these approaches can contribute more directly to clinical treatment? Finally, Sterzer reflects on a broader implication: viewing psychosis as an alteration of inferential processes shared by all brains rather than simply as a deficit, may change not only how we explain psychotic experiences, but also how we understand the people who experience them.

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