Alanna

Morton


Instructor: Malcolm Campbell
UWRT 1103
Due: April 6th, 2015

IQ at its Highest: Schizophrenia


The debate on whether or not an schizotypal individual is considered to be genius
or not is a huge controversy. What is the connection between schizophrenia and genius?
A stigma associated with schizophrenia the notion that those with the disease are insane.
Insanity is defined as the state of being seriously mentally ill. People tend to generally
think of anyone with a mental disease as having defects, but instead we should think and
understand in depth both the pros and cons of the particular sickness that is being referred
to, such as schizophrenia. There is a very fine line between schizophrenia and genius.
This major debate takes into consideration the biology of the brain, the creative aspects of
thinking, and the personality and actions of a person. Whether we consider schizophrenia
to be a disease or a blessing will affect the population of those who have schizophrenia.
In fact, schizotypal individuals are believed to correlate more with genius than insanity
because certain forms of psychopathology are said to profoundly affect the neural
substrates for rule-based thought that can significantly influence the quantity of creative
production (SOURCE 2). Schizophrenia has been proven to have both negative and
positive effects on the individual. It is just a matter of which is more dominant: the
negative or positive effects? Which treatment is most effective? What is the percentage of
people with schizophrenia capable of ignoring the altered reality associated with the
disease? And if schizophrenics have several cognitive impairments then why are they so
gifted in the area of creativity? I am going to propose the evidence to prove that there is
a correlation between schizophrenia and genius.


What is the brain up to?
Schizophrenia is defined as a brain disorder which people interpret reality
abnormally. Individuals with the disease show affected enlarged ventricles in the brain
seen in CAT scans. A recent theoretical proposal has highlighted the potential competing
interactions between prefrontal and subcortical brain systems that determine the
appropriate level of cognitive control filtering over bottom-up information for optimal
task performance. (SOURCE 2) There is a stigma with schizophrenia that involves
people believing that schizotypal individuals only experience negative symptoms. Yes, it
is true that schizophrenics experience cognitive deficits and impairments of the emotional
drive, however they also experience positive symptoms such as hallucinations and
delusions. In fact, it has been found that this form of psychopathology that profoundly
affects the neural substrates for rule-based thought in the brain can drastically influence
the quantity of creative production. In the current edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a German-American team of researchers, with the
cooperation of the Goethe University, reports that a selective dopamine midbrain
population that is crucial for emotional and cognitive processing shows reduced electrical
in vivo activity in a disease mouse model. (SOURCE 3) Their brain may appear
differently on the screen and they may act differently at times than those without the
disease, but they are capable as being just as in control of their actions. It just depends on
the current chemistry going on in their brain and the medication and sometimes-even will
power that they struggle to win over to fight all of the false reality. In a sense,
schizophrenics have stronger will power because they can ignore the abnormal reality
their brain has stirred up into becoming reality.


Personality Traits in the Schizotypal Individual

Schizotypal Individuals CAN Ignore the Altered Reality

In the 2001 movie, Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and produced by
Howard and Brian Grazer, the infamous case of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.
is captured as he undergoes the many problems encountered with the mental illness
schizophrenia. All the while captivating the divide between the notions of genius and
madness. The directors tremendously succeed in depicting the relationships among the
concepts of genius, madness, and alternate reality conceptualization, all of which Nash
faces throughout his life. Nashs mind divides into conscious genius and latent madness.
To counterweigh for his self-inflicted social isolation and need to succeed he appears to
unconsciously access his inactive madness and then to create a false reality to give him
the steadiness he needed to give full control to his creative thoughts. He had a burden,
which included a lot of stress for the need to be and to achieve something of significance.
This drove him to embrace his inherent madness to continue functioning at a high level of
mental awareness. Here we can very clearly see the correlation between schizophrenia
and genius because Nash is a living example. He embraced his mental illness and fought
off the abnormal reality or used it to engage in his mathematical thought process. As
Russell, B. ((1996). The conquest of happiness [First published as a Liveright paperback
1971: Reset and reissued 1996]. London, UK: W. W. Norton. [Original work published
1930].) said, One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that ones work is terribly important (p. 61) (SOURCE 1) This describes Nashs
predicament because in accessing his madness he increased his intelligence by allowing


him to achieve an alternate conceptualization of reality, even though it also slowly
diminished his connection to reality. He was eventually able to even overcome these
struggles in the absence of medicine or any treatment.
HELP: What do the Treatments Involve?
Yes, some treatments are more affective than others when it comes to
schizophrenia. While severe psychotic states of schizophrenia have been successfully
treated with psycho-pharmaceutical drugs for decades, cognitive scarcities and lack of
motivation dont respond well to standard drug therapy. This is a central problem because
as the long-term diagnosis of a patient is usually determined by the severity of the
negative symptoms. Consequently, the shortened average life span of about 25 years for
schizophrenia patients remained largely unaltered in recent decades. (SOURCE 3) "In
order to develop new therapy strategies we need an improved neurobiological
understanding of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia" explains Prof. Roeper of the
Institute for Neurophysiology of the Goethe University. (SOURCE 3)
The Best: Atypical or Conventional Antipsychotic Drugs
An experiment was conducted where twenty-six patients (13 men, 13 women)
with schizophrenia were recruited from a long-term chronic care inpatient facility and
divided into two groups on the basis of their current medications in a between-subjects
design. More specifically, the medicaitons included thirteen patients (six men and seven
women) receiving clozapine (N=5), olanzapine (N=6), or risperidone (N=2). They were
compared to another group of thirteen patients (seven men and six women) receiving


conventional neuroleptic medications. This was conducted to further describe the effects
of atypical antipsychotic medications compared to conventional antipsychotic
medications on schizophrenic patients and to which one was more affective. It was found
that certain medications effectively treat schizophrenics more efficiently than another
medication. This research concluded patient groups did not differ on clinical or
demographic measures. The results support the researchers hypothesis that patients
treated with atypical antipsychotic medications have normal P50 measures of sensory
gating. To clarify, P50 suppressions are used to study cognitive and intellectual
dysfunction. It is an operational measure of sensory gating that can be calculated by
averaging electroencephalographic responses to many pairs of auditory clicks separated
by 500 milliseconds. Usually, the second click is smaller than the response to the first
click. The researchers used this information to determine which patients, based on their
P50 suppressions, and should be treated with either of the two antipsychotic drugs. It was
determined that atypical antipsychotic medications have a greater efficiency in treating
cognitive symptoms.
Whats going on in Your Prefrontal Cortex? (SOURCE 4 SOMEWHERE)
Professors at Goethe University performed a study with lab mice in order to
research the detected typical impairment in working memory with corresponding
neurochemical changes in dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. This would mainly prove
and show the likeliness of occurrence of schizophrenia in an individual during treatment
such as think processes like working memory. They were able to show, by using single
cell recordings in the intact brain of mice, that dopamine midbrain neurons are


responsible for emotional and cognitive processing. They displayed altered patterns and
frequencies of electrical activity. In contrast, contiguous dopamine neurons, which are
involved in the process of motor control, were not affected.
Lets Determine the Severity

Gifted in Creativity More than you Could Imagine

The five most prevalent types of schizophrenia (dis- organized, catatonic,
paranoid, residual, and undifferentiated, paranoid schizophrenia) are said to be in
about 40% of those with the disease. source 1The author takes all of these types
and compares them to the result of the effected schizophrenics level of creativity
and intelligence as a result of the disease. It is found to be much higher in
comparison with those who do not have the disease. The author presents that the
link between genius and madness dates back more than 2,000 years and continues
to the present. In fact, the emphasis in psychological research began to change from
genius to creativity and giftedness. (SOURCE 1)
Ironically, individuals with mental illness exhibit more creative abilities than
those without them. Patients with schizophrenia marked by psychotic features are shown
to exhibit significant disruptions in the front parietal control network. These
neurocognitive abnormalities in forms of psychopathology may extend periods of
hallucinations in the patients. Thus, altering dramatically the quantity of creative output
by increasing the generative phase of creative production. (SOURCE 2) I acknowledge
the concept that there is evidence of serious methodological limitations, correlational


designs, and problematically unidirectional interpretations for those with schizophrenia.
However, the more output of the individual the more likeliness there is to be a higher
quality of creativity. With creativity comes madness. If every creative individual thought
exactly the same as the next then there would be no creativity at all. To be unique we
must think outside of the box. An altered reality, although considered a negative
symptom of schizophrenia, can also morph itself into a positive symptom. There is a
correlation between schizophrenia and genius, and that is just it: the schizotypal
individual can be genius.



Works Cited Page
Griffith, Mary Bess. Alternate Reality Conceptualization: Venturing Along the Fine Line
Between Genius and Madness. Issues in mental health nursing, 2011; 32(10): 624-31.
Ramey, Christopher H. Not in their right mind: the relation of psychopathology to the
quantity and quality of creative thought. Frontiers in psychology, 2014; 5: 835.
Goethe University Frankfurt. "Schizophrenia: Impaired activity of the selective dopamine
neurons." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 19 Feb. 2015. Web.
7 Mar. 2015.
Light, G. A., Geyer, M. A., Clementz, B. A., Cadenhead, K. S., Braff, D. L. Normal P50
Suppression in Schizophrenia Patients Treated With Atypical Antipsychotic
Medications. The American Journal of Psychiatry. Volume 157 Issue 5, May 2000, pp.
767-771