Brain top‐down processing deficits in shizophrenia

Abstract

The latest brain science pays much attention on the fact that sensory perception or cognition in the primary sensory cortex depend not only on the bottom‐up information from the sensory organs but also on the top‐down information of the anticipation from the higher brain regions. If the top‐down information of the anticipation dominates the bottom‐up information or if false top‐down information is provided, the sensory perception is perturbed and would result in hallucination. This hypothesis agrees with the pharmacological actions of various psychostimulants ; dopamine releasers enhance the brain activity of the prefrontal cortex and serotonin releasers enhance the information integrity among various cortical regions.