Consciousness and psychosis associated with schizophrenia

The hippocampus, particularly its CA3 autoassociation network, encodes spatial and temporal information by situating landmarks and objects within an allocentric frame. This process guides locomotion and organizes behavior across space and time, thereby creating phenomenal space and time and laying the groundwork for conscious awareness. The authors argue that conscious experience describes the informational content of self-organizing activity patterns in CA3. They propose that excessive pyramidal cell activity in CA3, resulting from deficient inhibition by GABAergic basket interneurons and leading to event memory formation unrestrained by entorhinal input, may be a mechanism for generating hallucinations in schizophrenia.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Information encoded by the autoassociation network of CA3 situates landmarks and objects within an allocentric frame of space and time. Guiding locomotion across the spatial environment, and generally organizing behaviour that transcends space and time, the hippocampus creates phenomenal space and time themselves, thus laying the foundations for conscious awareness. It is argued that conscious experience describes the informational content of self-organizing activity patterns in CA3. Excessive pyramidal cell activity in CA3, due to deficient inhibition by GABAergic basket interneurons, leading to event memory formation unrestrained by entorhinal input may be a mechanism for the generation of hallucinations in schizophrenia.