Atypical functioning of cortico-striatal brain networks that support cross-modality—a key human cognitive ability—may underlie altered processing of the self in schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and synesthesia. This disruption affects both the minimal self and the narrative self. The authors link these cognitive conditions to an atypical presentation of human self-domestication features, building on prior work connecting cognitive disorders and language evolution. This framework unifies linguistic and non-linguistic symptoms through deficits in the notion of self, supports the hypothesis that schizophrenia and autism are diametrically opposed conditions, and suggests that their origins are tied to recent human evolution, offering cues for earlier and more accurate diagnosis.
Building a truly conscious robot requires a brain that can support phenomenal consciousness like a human brain does. The Operational Architectonics framework, by examining millisecond-scale topographic sharp transitions in scalp EEG, reveals a hierarchical EEG architecture that mirrors the structure of the phenomenal world. This suggests that creating machine consciousness would need an implementation capable of supporting the same kind of hierarchical architecture found in EEG.
Music improvisation is explored through the lens of embodied cognitive science, specifically ecological and dynamical systems approaches. The article argues that improvising musicians generate musical material in real time by coordinating their bodies with instruments and environments, guided by affordances—opportunities for action that emerge from the performer-instrument relationship. A trumpet player's improvisation is described as a self-organized response to constraints, where the musician acts as an adaptive system. The work advocates that 4E approaches (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) offer valuable insight into improvisation by taking seriously the body-instrument-environment relationship.