Ssensing” Voices. A Theoretical Comparison

Abstract

Erwin Straus’ aesthesiological analysis of the voice-hearing modality can serve as a bridge between top-down models, which emphasize the emotional and inter-subjective significance of auditory hallucinations, and bottom-up models, which highlight the dysfunctional neurobiological mechanisms that cause them. The comparison with Crow’s hypothesis allows to include the aesthesiological approach in an anthropo-biological context in which schizophrenia appears to be the price that species Sapiens had to pay to acquire self-consciousness.

Keywords

• Erwin Straus’s aesthesiology
• auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia theory
• biological and cultural hominization and exaptation