Defensive‑Timing Disorders: A Neuroevolutionary Model of the Bipolar‑Psychotic Spectrum

Abstract

Abstract Mammalian social life oscillates between two broad modes: an agonic mode organised around dominance, tension, and defensive collapse, and a hedonic mode characterised by low arousal, reciprocity, and prestige-based coordination. Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that some Upper Palaeolithic groups moved fluidly between these modes, with ritual specialists (shamans) occupying a sanctioned niche in which brief psychotic-like states – often hallucinogen-facilitated – were tolerated and even valued. From a cognitive-neuroscience perspective, these altered states can be understood as transient perturbations of the timing architecture that normally aligns perception, simulation, and contextual inference. I propose that the bipolar-psychotic spectrum reflects a unified class of Defensive-Timing Disorders (DTD), arising from graded losses of parvalbumin-mediated inhibitory precision and hippocampal temporal-context stability. As this coupled scaffold weakens, defensive responses distort, salience becomes disordered, counterfactual representations gain excessive weight, and at the extreme, reverted escape emerges: a high-arousal immobility state representing a distinct pathophysiology. The same timing vulnerability may underlie the persistent cognitive impairments of schizophrenia, which can be viewed adds the cognitive expression of the same PV-hippocampal timing collapse. This paper integrates evolutionary anthropology, ethology, and cognitive neurodynamics to articulate a mechanistic account of the bipolar-psychotic spectrum that has not previously been formulated.