Mental Illness as impaired Bayesian Inference

A growing idea in computational neuroscience is that the brain can be
viewed as a sort of "guessing machine", constantly trying to guess
what is present in the external world, what is the best action to take
and automatically trying to predict the next moment.
The way the brain would do that is by maintaining and updating
internal probabilistic models of the world that serve to interpret the
environment and guide our actions, and using calculations akin to the
well known statistical methods of "Bayesian inference".

Visual feature extraction from natural scenes

Visual processing of simple image elements (such as lines and edges) does not happen inside a cognitive vacuum: it may differ when those simple elements are embedded within natural scenes that look more like what we see every day, as opposed to th e featureless backgrounds that are normally used in the laboratory. We know a good amount about the mechanisms that support vision under the latter conditions (i.e.

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