In this interview, Mitch Belkin and Daniel Belkin speak with Dr. Karl Friston about his proposed free energy principle. They discuss how it applies to various psychiatric and neurological disorders including schizophrenia, depression, autism, and Parkinson’s. They also touch on the disconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia, how theories of schizophrenia have evolved over the last two centuries, and the relationship between schizophrenia and autism.
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Who is Karl Friston?
Dr. Friston is a professor of neuroscience at University College London and an authority on brain imaging. He is the 20th most-cited living scientist with over 260,000 citations for his works. After studying natural sciences at Cambridge, he completed his medical studies at King’s College Hospital in London and worked for 2 years in an inpatient psychiatric facility on the outskirts of Oxford, where treated patients suffering from schizophrenia.
Dr. Friston has developed a number of statistical tools for analyzing data from the brain, including statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) or dynamic causal modeling (DCM). His mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalized filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion.
References
Scott Alexander – On attempting to Understand Friston’s Free Energy Principle
The Disconnection Hypothesis – Karl Friston
The Free Energy Principle – Karl Friston