Altered brain activity in schizophrenia may cause exaggerated focus on self

I thought we already knew this, but here goes:

Schizophrenia may blur the boundary between internal and external realities by over-activating a brain system that is involved in self-reflection, and thus causing an exaggerated focus on self, a new MIT and Harvard brain imaging study has found.

The traditional view of schizophrenia is that the disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions that characterize the disease are caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions.

But this study, appearing Jan. 19 in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that schizophrenia also involves an excess of connectivity between the so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves.

"People normally suppress this default system when they perform challenging tasks, but we found that patients with schizophrenia don't do this," said John D. Gabrieli, a professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and one of the study's 13 authors. "We think this could help to explain the cognitive and psychological symptoms of schizophrenia."

Gabrieli added that he hopes the research might lead to ways of predicting or monitoring individual patients' response to treatments for this mental illness, which occurs in about 1 percent of the population.

Schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and first-degree relatives of patients (who share half their genes) are 10 times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. The identities of these genes and how they affect the brain are largely unknown.

The researchers thus studied three carefully matched groups of 13 subjects each: schizophrenia patients, nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of patients and healthy controls. They selected patients who were recently diagnosed, so that differences in prior treatment or psychotic episodes would not bias the results.

The subjects were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while resting and while performing easy or hard memory tasks. The behavioral and clinical testing were performed by Larry J. Seidman and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, and the imaging data were analyzed by first author Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research scientist at the MIT Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute.


The rest is here, at MIT

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I wonder if such apparently maladaptive genes and traits are so common because they have been selected for in some way, at some time in the past. Mental illness seems associated with creativity and religious mental states; maybe maybe individuals with the the related genes sometimes confer beneficial traits to a group or village. Like a sociobiological version of the sickle-cell gene.

By uncle noel (not verified) on 26 Jan 2009 #permalink

But... neutral traits eventually become fixed (usually they just go away) in a population. SZ is probably genetic in some forms, and is probably in balance in some forms.

Some days I think everything is a balanced polymorphism.

I don't think Vincent Van Gogh reproduced, but his brother Theo did.
I think BP must have something to do with: the gay, the immune system, intelligence...
but "everything"?
Thanks for teaching me the word for it.

By uncle noel (not verified) on 27 Jan 2009 #permalink