AOF Activities & Events

People believe strange things (you may have noticed). Even in your own mind, deep in the cobwebs, some fairly odd dogmas may bubble and ferment. How did they get there? Why do we form beliefs, why do they stubbornly cling, and how do we use them? When we talk of convictions, do our words correspond to the real machinery of cognition? In short, just what are beliefs, and how do they coalesce and dissolve?

Michael Caton has some ideas. Join us for a talk by a psychiatrist whose research into delusions has led to interest in many kinds of distorted and false beliefs, social signaling, evolution, and the relationship of language and beliefs to truth and authority.

Mike grew up outside Philadelphia. After a career in the Bay Area biotech industry developing cardiac and cancer medications, Mike went to medical school at UC San Diego and did his residency in psychiatry here at UC Davis. His research interest is delusions and neuroimaging, and he sees patients in Santa Rosa. In addition to psychiatry, Mike enjoys trail running, blogging, linguistics, and travel. He has a wife and two-year-old daughter who keep him honest, and mostly non-delusional.

You may be a sharp, crystalline thinker with a whippish mind of lightning-pure perspicacity, or more like this humble writer, be an avocado-shaped middle-aged incel wedged behind a keyboard trolling teen cosplay blogs in a MAGA t-shirt dusted with Pringle crumbs. But (we say it between mouthfuls) you owe yourself to attend this talk.