!!Paul Fletcher - Biography
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Paul Fletcher trained in medicine (graduating in 1998) and specialised in psychiatry. His research career was motivated by the conviction that psychiatric illness required a more sophisticated understanding of brain processes. He has established a body of work elucidating alterations in brain responses across a range of psychiatric illnesses, but his work has continued to be shaped by fact that comprehensive research programmes must incorporate consideration of the social, environmental, cognitive and subjective contributors to psychiatric illness. \\
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His early work (1992 - 1998) on learning, memory and perception played a central part in establishing the role of frontal lobes human memory and offered insights into how small perturbations could cause and shape psychiatric disorder. He went on (1996 - 2005) to use combinations of psychopharmacological manipulations, psychological tests and neuroimaging in targeted ways, showing that a key drive to learning– the prediction error signal – was associated with frontal responses in healthy humans and that subtle perturbations in this signal could explain the emergence of psychotic symptoms in both schizophrenia and drug models of psychosis. This led to the development of an influential theory of delusions and hallucinations (Fletcher and Frith, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009). This theoretical framework has since stimulated a great deal of translational and computational psychiatric research and has also, through his public engagement activities, offered new ways of thinking and talking about the experiences of people suffering psychotic symptoms.\\
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He has subsequently applied this framework to exploring altered learning, perception and decision making in psychotic mental illness and health-harming over-consumption, devising complementary approaches to shape a translational approach to understanding normal experience and choice as well as perturbations associated with psychiatric illnesses and health-harming behaviours.\\ \\[{ALLOW view All}][{ALLOW edit pfletcher}][{ALLOW upload pfletcher}][{ALLOW comment All}]