An Unifying Neuronal Model for Normal and Abnormal Thinking

Abstract

Since little is still known about fundamental brain mechanisms associated to thought, its different manifestations are usually classified in an oversimplified way into normal and abnormal, like delusional and disorganized thought or creative thinking. Considering dopaminergic signal-to-noise neuronal modulation in the central nervous system, and the existence of semantic maps in the human brain, we developed a self-organizing neural network model to unify different thought processes into a single neurocomputational substrate. We performed simulations varying dopaminergic modulation and observed the total patterns that emerged at the resulting semantic map, assuming that these correspond to thought. The model thus shows how normal and abnormal thinking are generated, and that there are no clear borders between their different manifestations. Actually, a continuum of different qualitative reasoning, ranging from delusion to disorganized thought, and passing through normal and creative thinking, seems to be more plausible.