Hosted by the MRC Intergrative Epidemiology Unit

Abstract: Many psychiatric disorders are thought to have their origins in some kind of disturbance of neural development, with high heritability suggesting a primarily genetic etiology. The efforts of worldwide psychiatric genetics consortia have resulted in the identification of hundreds of rare and common risk variants for conditions like autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and others, providing strong evidence in favour of the neurodevelopmental hypothesis. I will discuss the implications of this neurodevelopmental model for how we conceive of psychiatric disorders, including whether diagnostic categories are natural kinds, the central role of developmental robustness in buffering genetic insults, the indirect relationship between risk genotypes and emergent phenotypes, the importance of stochastic developmental variation in determining individual outcomes, and the idea of observed psychiatric symptom clusters as maladaptive dynamical regimes of the perturbed neural system, not linked directly to the perturbations themselves. 

Biography: Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He studies the genetics of brain wiring and its relevance to variation in human faculties, psychiatric disease and perceptual conditions like synaesthesia. His current research focuses on the biology of agency and the nature of genetic and neural information. He is the author of “INNATE – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are” (Princeton University Press, 2018), writes the Wiring the Brain blog and is on Twitter @WiringtheBrain. He is currently working on a new book, “AGENTS - How Life Evolved the Power to Choose”, for Princeton University Press.    

Zoom link: https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/98856461634