The Coherence Problem: Integrating Computational, Phenomenological, and Network Accounts of Psychopathological Transformation
PsyArXiv Preprints April 20, 2026 preprint DOI: osf:w28g9_v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Depression |
| Keywords | Belief updating Bipolar disorder Brain networks Coherence Computational psychiatry Predictive processing Psychosis Salience Schizophrenia Clinical psychology Mental disorders Clinical neuroscience Psychotic disorders Health psychology Mental health |
| Key points | Argues that psychotic and affective states reflect a shared control problem in which inference on the brain's recurrent architecture tends toward self-reinforcing certainty unless continuously counteracted. Proposes a minimal decomposition targeting the entry, propagation, and temporal depth of coherence that maps manic, psychotic, depressive, and mixed presentations as neighboring regions in a shared space, reframing the question as which control policies sustain proportionate coherence and how they destabilize. |
Abstract
Psychotic and affective states alter not only what a person thinks and perceives, but how coherently their experience hangs together. Phenomenological, computational, network-neuroscience, and dynamical-systems traditions have each characterized aspects of this alteration, but largely in isolation from one another. This paper argues that these traditions converge on a shared control problem. If inference on the brain's recurrent architecture tends toward self-reinforcing certainty, as the paper proposes, then the system must continuously counteract that drift or experience reorganizes. Bipolar disorder provides the clinical lens because it resists the compartmentalization the field has imposed: the condition can produce manic, psychotic, depressive, and mixed configurations, and no account designed for one configuration readily extends to the others. A minimal decomposition, targeting the entry, propagation, and temporal depth of coherence, maps these psychopathological presentations as neighboring regions in a shared space and reframes the explanatory question: which control policies sustain proportionate coherence in ordinary cognition, and how they destabilize.