A lot of the quotes do find decreased connectivity, but some of them find increased connectivity between certain regions. It makes me think that there’s a probability there might be something more complicated than just “increased or decreased”, but rather specific types of connections. But that’s just a guess, and I think an explanation across all cortical connections is more parsimonious and therefore more likely a priori.
Of your criteria of “things to explain”, here are some thoughts:
4.1 The onset of schizophrenia is typically in the late-teens-to-twenties, 4.2 Positive symptoms—auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), “distortions of self-experience”, etc. 4.3 Negative symptoms—yes these are all critical to explain.
4.4 Creativity—hm, this is tricky and probably needs to be contextualized. Some people disagree that schizophrenia is associated with increased creativity in relatives, although I personally agree with it. I don’t think it’s a core aspect.
4.5 Anticorrelation with autism—I don’t think this is a core aspect. I’m not even sure it’s true.
4.6 Relation to myelination—I think this is likely true, but I think it’s too low level to call a core aspect of the disease per se. I agree with your point about two terms always yielding search results, this is true of Alzheimer’s disease as well.
4.7 Schizophrenia and blindness—I don’t think this is a core aspect, I agree with you it’s probably not true.
Other core aspects I think should be explained:
1. Specific types of gene pathways that are altered in people with schizophrenia being related to the development/function of whatever the physiologic thing being hypothesized is. Genetics are causal, so this is usually pretty helpful, albeit quite complex.
2. Cognitive deficits: These include impairments in executive function, working memory, and other cognitive domains. These are usually considered distinct from negative symptoms (anhedonia, blunted affect, etc), and usually involve a decline from functioning premorbid/earlier in life.
3. Why nicotine is helpful.
4. Why antipsychotics/neuroleptics seem to be helpful (at least in certain circumstances).
5. Why there is so much variability in the disorder? Why do some people end up with predominantly delusions, hallucinations, or negative symptoms as the core part of their experience with schizophrenia?
Just some thoughts. As I said, I’m glad you’re focused on this!
LOL I’m not focused on this at all. I think I’ve spent a whopping four days of my life thinking hard about schizophrenia—one day in 2021 that didn’t go anywhere, one day last summer where I read a bunch of papers and thought of this hypothesis and felt pretty good about it and then moved on to other things, then one more day like a week later to research and write the blindness + schizophrenia post, and yesterday to write this post. Schizophrenia not a significant personal or professional interest of mine. I am very impressed with myself for fooling you. Or maybe you’re just being polite. :)
(Understanding schizophrenia is plausibly indirectly helpful for my professional interests, for various reasons. Also, I have a rule-of-thumb that if I can write a decent blog post in four hours, I should just do it, often it leads to unexpected good things!)
Yeah the “things to explain” could have been more accurately titled “aspects of schizophrenia that I can easily think of right now, from either off the top of my head or skimming the wikipedia article”. :-P
I think the cognitive deficits are very straightforwardly and naturally predicted by my hypothesis.
I wrote something about nicotine but a different commenter said that what I wrote was flagrantly wrong. (I put a warning in the OP.) Guess I need to think about that more. Honestly, I don’t have a great understanding of what nicotine does to the brain in the first place. Something something acetylcholine :-P
I haven’t looked into antipsychotics / neuroleptics, and agree that doing so would be an obvious next step, and indeed maybe I should have done it before posting this. Sorry. I’ll put it on my to-do list.
Interesting, thanks. All makes sense and no need to apologize. I just like it when people write/think about schizophrenia and want to encourage it, even as a side project. IMO, it’s a very important thing for our society to think about.
A lot of the quotes do find decreased connectivity, but some of them find increased connectivity between certain regions. It makes me think that there’s a probability there might be something more complicated than just “increased or decreased”, but rather specific types of connections. But that’s just a guess, and I think an explanation across all cortical connections is more parsimonious and therefore more likely a priori.
Of your criteria of “things to explain”, here are some thoughts:
4.1 The onset of schizophrenia is typically in the late-teens-to-twenties, 4.2 Positive symptoms—auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), “distortions of self-experience”, etc. 4.3 Negative symptoms—yes these are all critical to explain.
4.4 Creativity—hm, this is tricky and probably needs to be contextualized. Some people disagree that schizophrenia is associated with increased creativity in relatives, although I personally agree with it. I don’t think it’s a core aspect.
4.5 Anticorrelation with autism—I don’t think this is a core aspect. I’m not even sure it’s true.
4.6 Relation to myelination—I think this is likely true, but I think it’s too low level to call a core aspect of the disease per se. I agree with your point about two terms always yielding search results, this is true of Alzheimer’s disease as well.
4.7 Schizophrenia and blindness—I don’t think this is a core aspect, I agree with you it’s probably not true.
Other core aspects I think should be explained:
1. Specific types of gene pathways that are altered in people with schizophrenia being related to the development/function of whatever the physiologic thing being hypothesized is. Genetics are causal, so this is usually pretty helpful, albeit quite complex.
2. Cognitive deficits: These include impairments in executive function, working memory, and other cognitive domains. These are usually considered distinct from negative symptoms (anhedonia, blunted affect, etc), and usually involve a decline from functioning premorbid/earlier in life.
3. Why nicotine is helpful.
4. Why antipsychotics/neuroleptics seem to be helpful (at least in certain circumstances).
5. Why there is so much variability in the disorder? Why do some people end up with predominantly delusions, hallucinations, or negative symptoms as the core part of their experience with schizophrenia?
Just some thoughts. As I said, I’m glad you’re focused on this!
Update: there’s some discussion of antipsychotics in my follow-up post: Model of psychosis, take 2 :)
LOL I’m not focused on this at all. I think I’ve spent a whopping four days of my life thinking hard about schizophrenia—one day in 2021 that didn’t go anywhere, one day last summer where I read a bunch of papers and thought of this hypothesis and felt pretty good about it and then moved on to other things, then one more day like a week later to research and write the blindness + schizophrenia post, and yesterday to write this post. Schizophrenia not a significant personal or professional interest of mine. I am very impressed with myself for fooling you. Or maybe you’re just being polite. :)
(Understanding schizophrenia is plausibly indirectly helpful for my professional interests, for various reasons. Also, I have a rule-of-thumb that if I can write a decent blog post in four hours, I should just do it, often it leads to unexpected good things!)
Yeah the “things to explain” could have been more accurately titled “aspects of schizophrenia that I can easily think of right now, from either off the top of my head or skimming the wikipedia article”. :-P
I think the cognitive deficits are very straightforwardly and naturally predicted by my hypothesis.
I wrote something about nicotine but a different commenter said that what I wrote was flagrantly wrong. (I put a warning in the OP.) Guess I need to think about that more. Honestly, I don’t have a great understanding of what nicotine does to the brain in the first place. Something something acetylcholine :-P
I haven’t looked into antipsychotics / neuroleptics, and agree that doing so would be an obvious next step, and indeed maybe I should have done it before posting this. Sorry. I’ll put it on my to-do list.
Interesting, thanks. All makes sense and no need to apologize. I just like it when people write/think about schizophrenia and want to encourage it, even as a side project. IMO, it’s a very important thing for our society to think about.