Schizophrenia - Law and Order Episode

[INRM]

Today's NBC Law and Order Episode (9:00 PM EST),

There was something odd on the show which even despite my knowledge of schizophrenia sounds quite odd.

In the show there was a writer named Saul Picard who as a kid experienced his sister being raped by a bunch of older men.

He developed schizophrenia as he got older and was put on Haldol which worked until she died.

He raped a bunch of kids. And in his mind he felt that there were the same guys that raped his sister, and he believed they were raping her and he was saving her, yet he was actually raping her.

How can a person think another person's raping them, when they're raping a person? Is this like an out of body thing? Or is this something else entirely.

I remember seeing this episode before and I remember being equally confused.

[Dancing David]

Because they have a thought disorder. Now please don't take a movie script literaly. That is not something that I ever heard of in schizophrenia. (That is some sort of holly wood gotcha) But from my limited experience of working with people with thought disorders (about a hundred of then) they do really have disorders in thier thoughts, they are rational from thier POV, there is just this difference.

Yet, there is thi spart of our brain (actually a lot of our brain) that manufacturers perception, the brain recreates memory, the brain creates all human subjective experience. If something goes amiss, then the experience goes amiss. People with delusion really believe the delusions to be true. They really believe that thier neighbor is a space alien, not imagine but believe. Like you and I believe that the sun rose in the east in the morning. For them they really are in the "truman Show".

It is wierd and very disturbing when you first encounter it. Thier reality is sometimes not the reality the rest of us share.

[INRM]

Dancing David,

When you say manufactures perception? Do you mean turns input from the senses into what would be experiences? Then stores them as memory?

Just as a for fun question -- this would completely and utterly disprove any notion of dualism or even consciousness having some kind of quantum-connection, correct?


BTW: I wouldn't use A. Crowley's quote if I were you... while belief may be the enemy of knowledge at least in some cases, Crowley was hugely deep into the occult and had some rather odd beliefs of his own.

[Dancing David]

um, the brain manufactures perceptions and they often include material not in the sensations.

memory is likely a reconstruction of events not a photo storage.

Um, I already now about Crowley, I sold my sould a long time ago. Alot of what he did was just shameless self promotion. What would you like to know about Crowley, I can start a thread if you like. I am currently a pagan buddhist more than anything else but have belonged to some magickal organizations as well. I am not a practioner of sex magick however.

[INRM]

Where does the material not included in the sensations received come from? Guesses based on the sensations?

[Dancing David]

I don't know that guess would be the correct term. More likely carrying over of patterns here are the two best examples (outside of memory and confabulation)

-the blind spot: if you hold out your arm and make a fist, the visual area where the retina's nerve bundle goes through the retina and out the eye is about the size of your fist. There are no rods and cones there to have sensations. Close one eye, look at a complex visual field, do you the that hole? I am not sure of the how but the brain fills in that hole.

-color visison: the arae of the foves (where the vast majority of cones are) is very small, it does sort of sweep around, but comapared to the whole visual field it is rather small. Look at the sunset, with one eye and then the other and then both eyes. Stunning isn't it. Most of the color you see is not sensed but filled in.

THe brain is agiant search engine, amongst other things it looks for patterns, it matches patterns (especially visual patterns, about 1/4- 1/3 of the cortex does that), it sort patterns, it grows in place around these paptterns.

So I can geuss that the brain doesn't guess, it just usues what i has and extends it.

[INRM]

Fascinating

[AudioFreak]

The brain can do some amazing things and create severe mental distortions resulting in inexplicable behavior. As someone whose best friend is schizophrenic, I know that its symptoms can range from comical to torment and result in everything from depression to mania and turn someone you know into a stranger who knows you. It's a very strange condition, indeed. When it acts up, it can be hell on that person and the people around them.

Not sure I've ever heard of cognitive distortion so great that someone would rape kids thinking they're saving someone from something that happened in the past. But, you never know. I've seen some really messed up things first hand as a result of this disease.

[zosima]

I agree with Dancing David.

The brain does this manufacturing in several different ways, one way that many people in computational neurobiology think of this innate information is as the setting of bayesian priors. In other words given no information, how likely am I to experience something.

That definition leads naturally to a simple model of schizophrenia that results from a different set of priors. So if I have schizophrenia I might just think that it is much more plausible that people around me can secretly be aliens. That said, the truth is probably more complex, but this is certainly part of the story.

As to where these priors come from, I can think of several definite sources, but this list is in no way claimed to be exhaustive. (Many of my examples come from the visual system, but they apply to all human perception).

1. Many priors are innate essentially evolved(or developed through a predetermined and largely invariable process that occurs before the age of 4). These include things about how likely it is for a visual scene to be composed a certain way. These priors are just generally true and are the cause of many optical illusions as well.(and messing with them undoubtably causes hallucinations)

2. Another big chunk of priors comes directly from experience. Studies in cognitive science show that subconsciously biasing the priors of healthy people can cause them to perceive completely different things, despite being presented the same visual stimulus.

3. Finally a third type of prior is formed by internal simulation. This is actually the only sort of prior that we are consciously aware of. It is basically the logical expectation that we can articulate, and is normally what people assume is perturbed in people with mental illness.

This information is used to form perceptions rather than an 'honest construction' for several reasons.

1. Some problems in perception are non-invertible. We can think of this mathematically as non-monotone functions, but what this means practically is that multiple interpretations of a given presentation on the retina are equally likely unless some prior is set.

2. Some are required as hardware hacks. For example neural ganglion only actually report information from the retina at relatively low resolution, and they are unevely distributed across the retina. (I forget the number exactly, but well less that a million pixels at the fovea). So incorporating information from the previous frame of vision and having the eye scan around the visual scene can increase the resolution in software, to use some of the language from computing.

3. Some of the priors just increase computational efficiency. If I can make a good guess many times faster, than be 100 percent much slower then I'm much less likely to be eaten by a tiger. (Although evolution may favor accuracy rather than speed these days).

So to conclude, human perception is highly irregular and probabilistic. I think the law and order does a disservice to the strange and beautiful morbidity that occurs in human perception, by presenting a rather boring interpretation that is easy to communicate to a public at large which is accustomed to trusting their perceptions far more than is rational. If you are interested in learning more I would recommend reading "The man who mistook his wife for a hat, and other clinical tales" by Oliver Sacks. Its fracking fascinating.