Talk:How the pathology of schizophrenia relates to symptoms

There is an interesting review paper on this topic in the General Archives of Psychiatry (..... look this up) relating many features of schizophrenia to known attributes of neural net computers.

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Hi there. Seems like you know a fair bit about this topic, and improving the schizophrenia article would be good. Two comments

• One guideline that might be relevant to this article is that Wikipedia isn't a scientific journal. It's the place for presenting the current view(s) of a particular issue, not debating new ones that haven't been aired in forums designed for the purpose (which in this case would mostly, b ut of course not always, be medical journals, and even then cutting-edge research needs to be placed in context as such rather than accepted theories).
• The title is a little bit unwieldy. Perhaps, when it's been worked on a little more, this material can be merged back into the main schizophrenia article.

Anyway, I wait with interest to see what transpires with this article! --Robert Merkel 13:11 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Nothing much has happened to the text since then, so I am moving it here. I very much hope that this can be developed into an article, rather than a piece of speculation. The Anome

What is the biological underpinning of the symptoms of schizophrenia?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Note: This is very speculative and I will organise it better later.

Schizophrenic symptoms are traditionally divided into

• Positive: Voices, hallucinations, delusions, thought insertion, ideas of references, grandiosity etc.
• Negative: Loss of pleasure, disorganisation, loss of motivation, loss of emotion ("blunting of affect").

(Some people put disorganisation into a category of its own).

Lets look at positive symptoms which a basically false thoughts.

A false thought can either be:

• a complete fabrication by the mind or totally spontaneous thought.
• or it can be serious misinterpretation of a true thought or sensation.
• or a combination of both.

Completely spontaneous brain activity classically occurs in epilepsy and we know that some forms of epilepsy, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy, can mimic schizophrenia. Spontaneous brain activity has also be been demonstrated on PET (positron emission tomography) brain scans.

However when you talk to schizophrenic patients it often seems that there might some basis of reality to their hallucinations. For instance a car goes by and they may hear some calling out to them from the car. Whereas a normal person may briefly think someone may have called out to them, they can quickly check and verify this possibility and dismiss if from their mind. A schizophrenic patient seems to a reduced capacity to "unbelieve" things or put them back into an appropriate context.

Brain function and Schizophrenia.

• The brain is highly modular with different areas having different functions.
• The function of a given position in the brain is not entirely fixed and can differ from person to person. It may even change in a compensatory way in a single person, say after a stroke.
• The brain needs connections to operate in a controlled and consistent manner. Without connections (such as white matter) parts of the brain may operate autonomously.
• At least some computational functionals of the brain are performed as if the brain was a "neural net" which is an artificial intelligence term for a particular method of computing.
• There is reduced small scale interconnectivity in the brain.
• There is reduced neuro-adaptibility (reflected neurologically in medium term memory) and in symptomatology by the "fixed" nature of delusions.

• Compensatory mechanism kick in that reduce overall mental efficiency. These compensatory mechanism often involve fear, persecution and are importantly mediated through dopamine receptors.

A similar process occurs in normal people in a state of panic or in a "flap" and because become non-coping and disorganised in times of stress. The difference is that normal people recognise this decompensation for what it is and recognise that it is temporary. A schizophrenic patient,however, tries to integrate the decompensation into an explanatory narrative or delusion.

Some experimental evidence shows an massive surge in dopamine and other catecholamines (or panic hormones) when a schizophrenic is given a stressfull task of abstract thought.

Thus different modules of the brain can operate in autonomous or non-integrated way. Sensations may be mis-interpreted because they can be be interpreted in context in sufficient time and the mis-interpreted sensation becomes real.

There is an interesting review paper on this topic in the General Archives of Psychiatry (..... look this up) relating many features of schizophrenia to known attributes of neural net computers.