What Makes a Schizo?
There have been some interesting developments in the scientific study of schizophrenia recently. It seems that schizophrenia is an actual physical problem in the brain and scientists are getting closer to understanding it.Along with this comes a better understanding of brain functino as a whole. That makes it interesting. Some recent examples:
Brain Compound ‘Throws Gasoline Onto The Fire’: Schizophrenia isn’t just hearing voices. Schizophrenics have problems in what is known as executive function of the brain. Roughly speaking, this is the ability to judge the current situation and alter your behavior to deal with it. Executive function is several steps above instinctive behavior. It’s one of those things that makes a brain worth having. More information on executive function at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_function. Not being an expert on schizophrenia, I did not know before reading this article that schizophrenics have great difficulty with executive function (also referred to as executive decision making or cognitive flexibility). They can make a plan but, if reality does not conform, they have a very hard time adapting. Their brains can’t process the new information and form new goals or new wrinkles in the plan to compensate.
New research has found specific chemicals (kynurenic acid) that influence the effectiveness of the brain’s executive functions. Too much seems to impair this ability. That’s an important thing to know because it means that treatments that do not lower the levels of kynurenic acid will have limited effectiveness in alleviating the problems of schizophrenia.
Why should this matter to those of us who are not schizophrenic or have loved ones who are? For now, it’s an intellectual thing. The brain is a complex and fascinating piece of equipment. Maybe we’ll get to other reasons later. But first, here’s more research that sheds an interesting light on schizophrenia:
We have two recent studies, one out of Sweden and another from the University of California, Irvine, showing that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (what we used to call manic-depressive syndrome) have similar genetic causes. The Swedish study, which had quite a large sample of subjects, showed that there is a strong likelihood that if one of these conditions runs in your family (and they do tend to run in families), the other will too.
That’s interesting. Here’s an even more interesting tidbit: Recently a Dutch scientist concluded that schizophrenia and autism may be different expressions of the same brain abnormalities (see Autism And Schizophrenia Share Common Origin). This last is based on less solid evidence, drawing on a literature review claiming to show that other physical abnormalities such as enlarged heads and “intestinal problems” accompany both conditions and develop at around the same time in gestation (though that could simply be a result of the standard order in which traits develop). This researcher looked for external causes, not genetic ones. But if schizophrenia is genetically caused and autism is linked to it, looking for a related genetic cause would make sense.
It’s possible, though, that genetics just sets up the conditions and something in the environment is needed to trigger whatever condition (autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) results, if any. If these things are all linked somehow, the variety of expression is amazing. I think that variety is simply a result of the complexity of the underlying system.
Being a computer guy, that makes me wonder if what can go wrong might be an interesting and productive direction for artificial intelligence research. I wish I had some time (and funding!) to pursue it.
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