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The two sides of the doors of perception: Implications in vision and hallucinations Shayma Suseelan, Imperial College London
Event details
Psychedelics in Medicine Society talk
Can we see everything as it is, or do we make a best guess about reality? A contemporary new computational and cognitive neuroscience framework of visual perception called the predictive processing (PP) model has roots in the latter conjecture. The top-down model supposes perception to be a result of an inferential hierarchical process due to past experience. In the psychedelic state however, this mode of perception is disrupted. The relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) model proposes that psychedelics help to relax heavily weighted predictions or beliefs and thus give rise to a bottom-up cascade of sensory influx. This presentation aims to highlight these two modes of perception; implications within a therapeutic context are highlighted and an explanation for the neural correlates of visual hallucinations is considered.
About the speaker
Shayam is a postgraduate researcher at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research and the University of Greenwich (UoG), where he is currently researching the mesolimbic reward system deficits in Gambling Use Disorder. He also part of the “Challenging Psychedelic Experiences & Integration” team at UoG. He completed his Master’s in Psychology at UoG, with his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of York.