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Psychosis – the price Homo sapiens pays for language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

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Abstract

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Papers
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Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2008 

Age- and sex-dependent uniformity across populations of the psychotic continuum reflects ontogeny of the cerebral torque. This sapiens-specific evolutionary innovation identified four compartments of association cortex as the language circuit: perceived speech > meaning > thought > speech production. Symptoms (due to directional asynchronies of callosal myelination) represent ‘leakages’ – negative anterior, positive posterior, linguistic to left, affective to right. The speciation event occurred 160KYA in the Y copy (PCDHY) of the ProtocadherinXY homologous gene pair with subsequent sequence change in PCDHX. Thus, language, H. sapiens & predisposition to psychosis resulted from a single chance event in a male, selected by females.

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