A Global Workspace perspective on mental disorders

Human consciousness may suffer progressive, staged dysfunctions analogous to cancer, caused by damaging external information that writes itself onto mind and body, especially during critical developmental periods. This can lead to failures in large-scale brain connectivity or damage the ability of goal contexts to contain conscious dynamics. The primary intervention is population-level limitation of exposure to triggering factors—a matter of social justice determined by cultural trajectory, group power relations, and economic structure. Individual intervention may only trigger or extend remission by reestablishing evolved control strategies, which remain largely unexplored.

Study at a glance

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundRecent developments in Global Workspace theory suggest that human consciousness can suffer interpenetrating dysfunctions of mutual and reciprocal interaction with embedding environments which will have early onset and often insidious staged developmental progression, possibly according to a cancer model, in which a set of long-evolved control strategies progressively fails.Methods and resultsA rate distortion argument implies that, if an external information source carries a damaging 'message', then sufficient exposure to it, particularly during critical developmental periods, is sure to write a sufficiently accurate image of it on mind and body in a punctuated manner so as to initiate or promote similarly progressively punctuated developmental disorder, in essence either a staged failure affecting large-scale brain connectivity, which is the sine qua non of human consciousness, or else damaging the ability of embedding goal contexts to contain conscious dynamics.ConclusionThe key intervention, at the population level, is clearly to limit exposure to factors triggering developmental disorders, a question of proper environmental sanitation, in a large sense, primarily a matter of social justice which has long been known to be determined almost entirely by the interactions of cultural trajectory, group power relations, and economic structure, with public policy. Intervention at the individual level appears limited to triggering or extending periods of remission, representing reestablishment of an extensive, but largely unexplored, spectrum of evolved control strategies, in contrast with the far better-understood case of cancer.