The Informational Underload (Sensory Deprivation) Model in Contemporary Psychiatry

Abstract

To summarize briefly: Converging data from many disciplines — psychology, psychiatry, social theory, biochemistry, neuropharmacology, neurophysiology — point to the sensory input regulating mechanism of the central nervous system as a critical factor in the production of hallucinoses and psychotic experience. There is good evidence that what we have called the informational underload model ‘holds considerable promise for improving our understanding of many clinical and non-clinical phenomena of interest to psychiatry. The evidence suggests that a neurophysiological, internal informational underload syndrome may be a final common pathway of psychotic experience. The question as to where such a syndrome might occur in the brain, together with the question of whether such an informational underload syndrome might be due to toxins, genetic factors, conditioning processes, anxiety or dissociation, or other causes, has to be left open. What is needed now, is research directed at these two questions: 1) does such an internal informational underload syndrome occur in the brain, 2) when, where, and under what circumstances does it occur?