Aesthetic anhedonia—a reduced capacity for pleasure and meaning from art—and psychotic hyper-meaning—where neutral events take on excessive significance—are typically studied separately. This paper argues they are opposite dysregulations of a shared process governing how meanings stabilize over time. The authors propose a framework of symbolic closure dynamics: aesthetic anhedonia reflects hypo-closure, a failure to reach or sustain convergence of meaning, while psychotic hyper-meaning reflects hyper-closure, premature or misanchored convergence on insufficient evidence. The framework bridges reward-based models, aberrant salience, predictive processing, and network theories, offering testable predictions about timing, stability, noise sensitivity, and revisability of meaning formation. Aesthetic stimuli are highlighted as sensitive probes of these dynamics.
A new theoretical framework, Recursive Informational Curvature (RIC), models conscious cognition as a stability regime of neural trajectories on a stratified informational manifold. The framework proposes that recursive gain, symbolic entropy dispersion, and loop-level timing coherence jointly determine whether neural activity remains stable or approaches collapse. RIC integrates three geometric layers: a Fisher layer for precision-weighted discriminability, a Finsler layer for direction-dependent transition cost, and a Hermitian layer for phase-coded recursive coordination. Mechanistic hypotheses link specific cortical neuronal classes to curvature control. A reduced EEG-based analysis showed that a geometry-sensitive neural state-space proxy related to moral judgment bias, but broader socially mediated outcomes were not captured by this reduced measure alone.