Professor Paul Fletcher

Director of Studies in Medicine (Pre-clinical)

Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience

What is your subject and specific area of study?

I am a psychiatrist interested in how the brain builds up an image of the world in which it must survive. Many of us think that we see the world as it is: we don’t. Our conscious experience of the world has been highly processed, refined and often warped by largely unconscious processes. Most of us are a mass of preconceptions, biases and guesses that enable us to muddle through our everyday lives. If we bear this in mind, perhaps it becomes easier to understand what mental illness is and how perilously close the average person is to it. This is what interests me and drives my research and clinical work. I like to use brain imaging to understand how the brain goes about its deceitful business. I also give drugs to people. These drugs alter their perceptions of the world and help me to understand how the early symptoms of mental illness might arise. I don’t require my students to act as volunteers for these studies.

What makes Clare College such a good place to study your subject?

A student who comes to study medicine has a hard road ahead. She or he must learn about the basic mechanisms of the human body and this can sometimes seem far away from learning to diagnose and treat patients. Clare is blessed with a group of supervisors who are active both in basic science research and in clinical practice, dealing with patients and illness. They are in a wonderful position to take you through the basics and to relate these basics to the work of the doctor. As someone who is relatively new to Clare I have also found them friendly, helpful and welcoming.

Main Publications:

'Perceiving is Believing: a Bayesian model of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia', Fletcher, PC; Frith, CD, Nature Reviews Neuroscience (in press)

'Appetitive and aversive taste conditioning in a computer game influences real world decision-making…', McCabe, JA et al, Journal of Neuroscience (in press)

'On the benefits of not trying: brain activity and connectivity reflecting the interactions of explicit and implicit sequence learning', Fletcher, PC et al, Cerebral Cortex (2005)