From Abnormal Time-Space Experience to Delusions: Spatiotemporal Psychopathology

Delusions are considered cognitive disturbances, which have been associated with various cognitive functions and their underlying neuronal correlates. However, this leaves open the exact psychological and neuronal mechanisms that ground certainty in such aberrant beliefs: What makes the subject so certain, against the objective evidence, of the delusional content? This chapter proposes a spatiotemporal approach to delusion that links psychological and neuronal levels. It first addresses the subjective experience of delusions with specific reference to their space-time coordinate system, drawing heavily on phenomenology. This is followed by a presentation of neuronal data, with a specific focus on the temporal and spatial elements of the brain’s neuronal activity, for example, its topography and dynamics. The chapter concludes that the spatial and temporal features are shared by neuronal and psychological levels of delusion that provide a bridge, or a ‘common currency’, that entails ‘spatiotemporal psychopathology’.