The Evolution of Symbolic Thought: At the Intersection of Schizophrenia Psychopathology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Neuroscience

The human capacity for symbolic representation arises, evolutionarily and developmentally, from the exploitation of a widespread sensorimotor network, along a fundamental continuity between embodied and symbolic modes of experience. In this regard, the fine balancing between constrained sensorimotor connections (responsible for self-embodiment processing) and more untethered neural associations (responsible for abstract and symbolic processing) is context dependent and plastically neuromodulated, thus intersubjectively constructed within a specific socio-cultural milieu. Instead, in the schizophrenia spectrum this system falls off catastrophically, due to an unbalance toward too unconstrained sensorimotor connectivity, leading to a profound distortion of self/world relation with a symbolic activity detached from its embodied ground. For this very reason, however, schizophrenia psychopathology may contribute to unveil, in a distorted or magnified way, ubiquitous structural features of human symbolic activity, beneath the various, historically determined cultural systems. In this respect, a comparative approach, linking psychopathology and ethnoarchaeology, allows highlight the following invariant formal characteristics of symbolic processing: (1) Emergence of salient perceptive fragments, which stand out from the perceptual field. (2) Spreading of a multiplicity of new significances with suspension of common-sense meaning. (3) Dynamic and passive character through which meaning proliferation is experienced. This study emphasizes the importance of fine-grained psychopathology to elucidate, within a cross-disciplinary framework, the evolutionarily and developmental pathways that shape the basic structures of human symbolization.