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