Aberrant Salience

October 6, 2025

When Everything Means Something…

Ways of Seeing the World

In the previous essay entitled "The Link Between Schizotypal Traits and Conspiratorial Thinking", we explored why conspiracy theories and paranoid narratives follow such predictable patterns and conclude that "powerful entities secretly control everything". We saw how this emerges from the intersection of agency detection, pattern recognition, tribal psychology, and the desperate human need for control and meaning.

Sometimes when some people experience "bad things", they look around them and respond via:

• "Aha! I see the hidden connections! Everything is relevant. I can explain everything." — The Pattern Detection System + The Hyperactive Salience System
• "An agent intentionally caused this" — The Hyperactive Agency Detection System
• "The powerful out-group is against us. They caused this." — The "Us vs Them / In-Group vs Out-Group / Tribal Thinking" System
• "I understand what's going on. I know what's happening. I see through the veil." — The Control Craving System + The Meaning Making System

Now let's go deeper into the neurobiology. Specifically, let's talk about the "aberrant salience hypothesis" of schizophrenia. This elegant model helps explain not just schizophrenia, but why certain cognitive patterns emerge when dopamine systems get dysregulated.

What Is Salience?

First, let's define terms. Salience is simply the property by which something stands out. It's what your brain flags as "this matters, pay attention to this." Right now, as you read this, thousands of stimuli are hitting your senses, like the pressure of your chair, background sounds, the temperature of the air, visual information in your periphery, etc. Your brain ignores almost all of it. The words on this page have salience. The hum of your refrigerator probably doesn't.

This salience system is critical for survival. You need to rapidly distinguish: signal from noise, importance from irrelevance, threat from background. And this system is largely mediated by dopamine (particularly from the ventral tegmental area projecting to the striatum and prefrontal cortex).

When dopamine fires in response to something unexpected or important, it essentially tags that stimulus with a "this is significant" marker. This is adaptive. This is how you learn what matters.

But what happens when this system misfires and when dopamine starts tagging everything as significant? What do you get when neutral stimuli, like a car driving by, a stranger's glance, or a random phrase on TV, suddenly feel intensely meaningful and personally relevant?

That's aberrant salience. And it's potentially the core mechanism underlying the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia.

All in all, the aberrant salience model is remarkably useful as a framework for understanding the subjective experience of delusion, hallucination, and psychosis.

Two Narratives: A Thought Experiment

Let me try to make this concrete by walking you through two different ways of experiencing the same moment. Think of these as two different cognitive "lenses": two different salience systems operating on the same raw sensory input.

Narrative 1: The Regulated Salience Lens

First, imagine the following scenario:

You're walking down a city street. A car drives past. A woman across the street glances in your direction. You pass a coffee shop. Two men are having a conversation, and they're using their hands in boisterous gestures. You check the street sign. Then your phone buzzes. It's a notification. You check it, dismiss it, and continue walking. Suddenly you remember a deadline you had forgotten. You make a mental note to call someone when you get home.

Narrative 2: The Hyperactive Salience Lens

Now, let's revisit the same scene but from a salience system that's overactive:

You're walking down a city street. A car drives past. It's a black sedan. Your attention locks onto it. Something about it feels significant. You can't quite articulate why, but that dopamine signal is firing: "This matters. Pay attention."

You notice the license plate. The numbers... wait. Those numbers. Don't they match something? Maybe something you saw earlier today? Or was it yesterday? The connection feels real, feels important, even if you can't quite pin it down yet. (Someone's birthday? Someone's nickname? A phone number? A zip code?)

The car turns the corner. You keep walking, but now you're scanning. Your salience system is fully activated. Everything feels pregnant with meaning.

A woman across the street glances in your direction. Eye contact. Brief, but was it too brief? Like she was checking on you, then deliberately looking away? Your brain serves up an explanation instantly: she was watching you. Monitoring you. For whom?

The black sedan. The woman's glance. The pieces are connecting.

You pass a coffee shop. Through the window, you see two men having an intense conversation. One of them gestures as you walk by. Wait. Was that gesture about you? Your salience system screams "YES". That wasn't random. Nothing is random. Everything is connected.

A street sign catches your eye. The letters seem to rearrange themselves in your peripheral vision, almost like they're spelling out a message. You know that's not literally happening; street signs don't change. But the feeling of hidden meaning is overwhelming. The pattern is there. You just need to decode it.

Your phone buzzes. A notification. You unlock it, and even the specific arrangement of apps on your screen suddenly seems non-coincidental. Why is the weather app next to your banking app? Did someone rearrange them? Is that symbolic? Is something being communicated?

You remember the black sedan. The woman watching you. The men's gestures. The street sign. Your phone. It's all fitting together now. They're monitoring you. Tracking you. But who are "they"? Government? Corporations? Some shadowy organization? The specifics don't matter as much as the certainty: there is intentional coordination happening. You're at the center of it. And now you see it.

More importantly (and this is crucial), you're the only one who sees it. Other people walk by, oblivious. (You might say, "They're sheep." or "They're asleep to all of this.") They don't understand what's really happening. But you do. You've pierced the veil. You have special knowledge. In a strange way, despite the fear, there's power in this. You understand what others don't.

Everything is relevant. Everything is connected. Every stimulus confirms the narrative. The pattern is everywhere once you know how to look for it.

…

This is what aberrant salience feels like.

Every stimulus gets tagged as meaningful. Your brain's pattern-detection system finds connections everywhere—because it's desperately searching for them, and pattern-detection systems will always find patterns in sufficient noise. Your agency-detection system attributes intention behind everything. Your tribal psychology identifies an out-group persecutor. And your need for control and meaning gets satisfied by the narrative you're constructing: "I understand what's really happening."

The scariest part? From inside this experience, it doesn't feel like "delusion". It feels like insight. Like you're finally seeing clearly while everyone else stumbles around blind.

The Big Difference

So what's the difference between these two narratives/experiences?

It all comes down to how well-regulated your salience system is.

In the first scenario (the calm, simple one), your salience system is doing its job appropriately. Dopamine fires for things that actually matter and warrant attention: a deadline you forgot and a practical next step. But it stays quiet for the endless stream of neutral stimuli. The woman's glance doesn't trigger an alarm. The men's gestures don't get flagged as relevant to you. The street sign is just navigation information, not a coded message.

Your brain is constantly making these micro-decisions: "Does this matter? No. Does this? No. Does this? Yes, a bit." It's constantly filtering for relevant signals from noise, and when the system works well, you barely notice it happening.

But when someone's pattern-detection machinery is working overtime and the sensitivity is turned way up (all the way to 11), their brain creates genuine felt experiences of significance and connection. Not vague hunches, not "maybe that's meaningful." — but visceral, powerful experiences of "This absolutely matters and I need to understand it right now." Nothing is coincidental.

For the average "neurotypical" person, the second narrative (the hyperactive one) might seem obviously delusional. "Of course the car doesn't mean anything! Of course that woman's glance was random! How could you possibly think otherwise?"

But that response fundamentally misunderstands what's happening.

From inside the experience, it doesn't feel random.

The salience feels as real as any feeling you've ever had. The connections feel as genuine as any insight you've ever experienced. The pattern feels as clear and undeniable as 2+2=4.

Think about the last time you had a genuine "Aha!" moment: something clicked into place and you suddenly understood how pieces fit together. Remember that feeling of certainty? That sense of "Yes, I see it now; there's a connection!"? Now imagine having that feeling triggered constantly, by everything you encounter. That's closer to what aberrant salience produces.

This is why simply telling someone experiencing psychosis "You're being paranoid, none of that is real" doesn't work. You're asking them to dismiss something that feels absolutely, viscerally true to their nervous system. And this isn't just subjective; it's reflected in their physiology, down to their neurochemical activity and systematic dysregulation.

They are experiencing those connections as real and meaningful. It is their brain generating those feelings of significance (that don't correspond to actual significance in the world). Both things are true simultaneously.

You can't just "think your way out" of a dysregulated neurotransmitter system any more than you can think your way out of a fever.

A Compassionate Framing

Here's the part that matters most, and the part that often gets lost in clinical descriptions:

People experiencing aberrant salience are trying to make sense of genuinely confusing, frightening experiences.

Imagine your brain suddenly started telling you that everything around you is significant, meaningful, and potentially threatening. Signals are firing constantly: "Pay attention to this! And this! And this! It all means something!" Your nervous system is in a state of heightened alert, and you don't know why. That's terrifying and disorienting.

So what do you do? You try to make sense of it. You construct a narrative that explains why all these signals are firing. And the paranoid narrative that might say that "powerful entities are controlling everything, but I see through it" isn't just random delusion. It's an attempt to create coherence from chaos, to restore meaning and control in the face of overwhelming, dysregulated signals.

If your brain is screaming that something important and dangerous is happening, the conspiracy narrative says something that can actually be soothing: "Yes, something IS happening. Here's what it is. Here's why you're feeling this way. You're not crazy; you're seeing the truth that others miss."

It's actually a fairly logical response to illogical input.

And here's something that makes this even more complex:

Sometimes the paranoid narrative is addressing real things.

People with schizophrenia often do face stigma, discrimination, and social marginalization. They often have been treated poorly by systems that should help them. They often are powerless in many domains of their lives. They may have experienced real trauma, real betrayals, real persecution.

So they're not completely wrong about being vulnerable or about power structures working against them. The tragedy isn't that they're detecting persecution where absolutely none exists. Often, the tragedy is that they're experiencing real marginalization while their dysregulated salience systems are creating false patterns on top of the real ones, which all makes it impossible to distinguish actual threats from imagined ones, actual conspiracies from phantom ones.

They are experiencing something very real in their nervous system. If you could peer into their brain with sufficiently advanced imaging, you'd see it all happening there: the dopamine dysregulation, the hyperactive salience networks, the pattern-detection systems running wild.

Big Universal Questions

People with hyperactive salience systems are fundamentally just like everyone else, trying to answer the same big questions we all grapple with:

What's going on? How do I explain what's happening? Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things keep happening to me? Why have I been hurt so many times? Am I actually safe? How do I ensure my safety? Am I worthy of love? Who actually loves me? Why does the world work the way it does? How do I make sense of my experiences? What should I pay attention to? What truly matters?

These aren't pathological questions. These are human questions. The difference is in how our brains help us answer them.

All humans face the challenge of finding balance between extremes:

• "Everything matters." ←vs→ "Nothing matters."
• "Everything is connected." ←vs→ "Nothing is connected."
• "Everything might be relevant." ←vs→ "Everything is meaningless noise."
• "Powerful entities control/manipulate everything." ←vs→ "No one has coordinated power."
• "People are trying to control me." ←vs→ "No one ever manipulates others."
• "The world is dangerous and threatening." ←vs→ "The world is perfectly safe."
• "There's always someone to blame." ←vs→ "No one's responsible for anything."
• "I can understand everything with a grand narrative." ←vs→ "The world is incomprehensible."

Most of us, most of the time, live somewhere in the messy middle of these spectrums. We acknowledge that some things matter more than others. That some patterns are real while others are coincidence. That the world contains both danger and safety, both manipulation and genuine kindness, both comprehensible patterns and irreducible complexity.

But when your salience system is dysregulated, you get pushed hard toward the left end of these spectrums. The threatening end says: "Everything matters. Everything is connected. Everyone might be dangerous. The world needs to be decoded, right now, constantly. I need to secure my position in this world in opposition to those who are against me."

The Deeper Reality

We can acknowledge that some of what people with hyperactive salience fear stems from observable truths about reality. These are genuinely complicated, genuinely nuanced aspects of existence that we're all struggling with:

How do we understand what's happening around us? What connections are real versus coincidental? What actually causes suffering? How do we stay safe in a world with real dangers? How do we protect ourselves from real harm while staying open to connection? How do we know who to trust? What intentions do others actually have? What meanings are we constructing versus discovering? Do we have a good explanation for any of these things?

These big questions don't have simple answers. The difference is that most of us can tolerate some uncertainty about them. We can say "I don't fully understand this yet." or "This is probably multiple things interacting in complex ways." or "Maybe I'll never know for sure, and that's okay."

When your salience system is screaming that everything is urgent and meaningful, that tolerance for uncertainty evaporates. You need answers. You need to understand. You need the pattern to complete itself. The dysregulated dopamine system creates a sense of urgency that demands resolution.

What Determines Our Lens?

Which lens we look through (whether it's regulated or dysregulated, calm or hyperactive, etc.) depends on an almost incomprehensibly complex web of factors:

Start with neurobiology: dopamine regulation, genetic vulnerabilities, the construction of your prefrontal cortex and salience networks, how your error-detection systems developed.

Layer in development: prenatal environment, childhood experiences, family dynamics, trauma history, attachment patterns.

Add environmental context: current stress levels, sleep quality (or lack thereof), social isolation versus connection, substance use, medical conditions.

Include psychological factors: what cognitive frameworks you have available, what narratives you've internalized, what you practice attending to, what meaning-making strategies you've developed.

Expand to social context: socioeconomic status, experiences of discrimination or marginalization, cultural frameworks for understanding mental experiences, access to supportive relationships and resources.

And recognize that all of these factors interact dynamically, across multiple timescales: from the milliseconds of neural firing to the decades of development, and from the immediate stress of last night's poor sleep to the evolutionary pressures that shaped primate brains over millions of years.

Conclusion

For those of us lucky enough to have well-regulated salience systems most of the time, we don't have to think about this much. We naturally filter for the signal from noise, the important from irrelevant, and the threatening from neutral. We know, fairly intuitively, what deserves our attention. We can walk down a street and let most stimuli wash over us unnoticed.

For people with schizotypal traits or schizophrenia, it's harder — much harder. The dysregulated system keeps generating false alarms. The pattern-detection machinery keeps finding ominous connections. The agency-detection system keeps attributing hostile intentions. And the need for understanding and control keeps demanding narratives that make sense of it all.

So the crucial question is:

What salience signals is their brain generating, and how is their brain interpreting those signals?

A brain with a dysregulated salience network can distort the input of any and all stimuli, turning even neutral, random, and benign situations into highly coordinated, significant events that are deeply related to bigger picture narratives. And it's all in an attempt to do the basic things brains are supposed to do with inputs: find patterns, detect threats, understand causation, maintain a coherent sense of self and world, etc.

The Call For Compassion

We're all trying to put the pieces together in the big puzzle of life, but people with schizophrenia or schizotypal traits are often trying to put all the pieces together — every piece they can find. And sometimes the only way to weave a somewhat coherent grand narrative together that encompasses every odd detail of countless irrelevant inputs is to craft a highly elaborate (albeit fantastical) story that becomes a collection of fixed delusions, reinforced by the same common cognitive biases and fallacies all humans fall prey to.

This is what happens when a dysregulated brain tries to cope with the same reality we all face: a big bizarre world filled with an endless ocean of confusing (and often unrelated) happenings that leave us craving certainty, understanding, answers, and explanations.

The truth is that paranoid narratives of persecution and conspiracy emerge from dysregulated neurotransmitter systems interacting with compelling ancient evolutionary biases, trying desperately to make sense of an overwhelming flood of seemingly significant stimuli.

How can we respond to this with anything but compassion?