There is a long tradition of (attempts at) bridging language and consciousness. Both are human-specific traits, even with precursors in other species, and both are intimately intertwined. Putting it very roughly, human consciousness can be construed, to a large extent, as a sort of inner speech (Morin, 2009; Skipper, 2022). By contrast, the most developed forms of animal consciousness only...
Human consciousness is said to be largely a form of inner speech. At the same time, humans are endowed with outstanding narrative abilities, which go beyond our linguistic capacity, even if they become potentiated by language. In this paper, we argue that as we evolved more prosocial, selected changes in the hardware of our “narrative brain”, together with selected changes in our behavior that...
Recent research has proposed that certain aspects of psychosis, as experienced in, e.g., schizophrenia (SCZ), but also aspects of other cognitive conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and synesthesia, can be related to a shattered sense of the notion of self. In this paper, our goal is to show that altered processing of self can be attributed to an abnormal functioning of...