Psychological Space-time Reinforcement Sensitivity Hypothesis & Mental Disorders: From Special to General Relativity Interpretation

Abstract

The reinforcement sensitivity theory lacks basic sources of any human experience :time, place, and learning contexts that have shaped the reinforcement; therefore I have assumed a missing link in Gray's framework based on special relativity relying on the «what, where, and when of happenning»? as major resources of human conscious experience, which under punishment or reward exceed the sensitivity to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli transcending therefore the Weber law, that's why I called it: Psychological Space-Time Reinforcement Sensitivity “PSTRS” axis. The lasts explains BAS and BIS systems sensitivity to reinforcement across the cognitive space-time continuum of episodic memory, and not only across the two great dimensions of fear/anxiety and defensive distance of the McNaughton & Corr model of 2004. So, based on the disruption of the high-sensitivity information processing system in the brain, the four-dimensional conscious experience is distorted by its underlying sources and context. Thus, one of the timedominating records prevents the individual from overcoming the present., such in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (psychological sensitivity to the past). These temporal records clearly lose their sequence and associative nature in dissociative symptoms due to the disruption of the most important milestone on which Einstein's physics was based. Consequently, psychological space-time reinforcement sensitivity supposes that psychological disorders can be interpreted according to the laws of special relativity (acceleration / deceleration), but this seems more complicated when it comes to mental disorders where the self is disturbed on its spatio-temporal axis as observed in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia looks like a three-componements disorder characterized by a disruption of the experience of time, place and self, which could be asummed up as a “self space-time disturbance". Notably schizophrenic patients appear losing the ability to gather in a dynamic way these componements, as if the world seemed missig the gestalt characteristic or fragmented. The past felt like an inevitable destiny inhibits the direction towards the future; sometimes disorient the self to the point of feeling lost, as if the psychological time slows down to the point of feeling separated from the « now » the physical time. So are we dealing with an Euclidian space? The article attempts to provide a non-traditional interpretation of mental disorders by including general relativity in psychological studies, based on the neurobiological bases involved in the spatio-temporal processing of the conscious experience in the quantum brain.