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Scientists Afflict Computers With Schizophrenia 143
An anonymous reader writes "Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University. In their experiments, the scientists used a virtual neural network to simulate an excessive release of dopamine in the brain and found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters."
Hyperlearning (Score:2)
Do schizophrenics typically have eidetic memories? This is not a symptom I was aware of.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
the medications supposedly help erase memories. at least my nurse seemed to think they do. In my case the medications seem to help, but I wouldn't stake anything important on so called anti-psychotics or even atypical anti psychotics either.
in my case i drink heavily filtered water, avoid most sugar natural or not, and avoid artificial sweeteners, avoid all caffeine, and the only thing i noticed is my thirst dropped 50% and devoid of caffeine and sugar that i get less dizzy from my medications. i also have an increase in my conscious. e.g. i am now extremely worried (but not paranoid) that i bragged about knowing things i didn't know at the time, and i realized i was asking for things i didn't need or want in my life. if i could change the past i would undo asking for things i didn't need or even want, it was like someone thought i needed to have that kind of thought and made me think it for myself.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
What about BOOZE to erase the memories? And does it work on virtual networks?
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
Yes Booze does work.unfortunately it gives you a sore head . As for simulated networks... I've just added a "drunk" function to mine! It randomly modifies the link weights. It behaves about as well as an extremely drunk person. Success I suppose!
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
Now to add the "hangover" functionality. That is a lot more difficult. Strange how you can easily get a NN drunk but it is far more difficult to give it a hangover.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
There a bit like a very bad version of heroin.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:3)
Do schizophrenics typically have eidetic memories? This is not a symptom I was aware of.
I've often read that remembering something is a constructive process. I tend to think of it like checking out a revision from source control software. All it has are a bunch of diffs and pointers, and it executes a process on them to construct a snapshot of what the code looked like at some particular time. From that perspective, the snapshot is a new piece of output, even though it's cached information from the user's perspective. Human memory is said to work the same way: it's reassembled, not retrieved.
So, if a person has eidetic memory, then one would expect them to have a better than average "ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters". On the other hand, since a defining trait of eidetic memory (as the term is often used) is being able to recall any detail and not just "what's meaningful", it must also entail exceptional ability to store and recall mass amounts of raw data (the diffs and pointers in my analogy). But nonetheless, I'd expect them to be exceptionally strong at filtering and reconstruction as well if they're able to form that data into coherent memories and verbalize them.
Then I suppose the hyperlearning hypothesis is saying that the reconstruction process breaks down because the data is too abundant and disorganized. Maybe I can extend the file storage analogy a little further: a hard disk that's so full that you can't defrag it? Or one where deleted files stay behind and come up instead of whatever you tried to overwrite on those disk sectors? Corrupt file system table?
IANAN/P (I am not a neurologist/psychologist). This is all my layman's, Wikipedia-level understanding and would welcome elaborations or corrections.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
Ok,
Schizophrenics have less brown matter volume, this is the bit that joins things together, white matter focuses on 'tasks' (crudely)
Over time both brown and white matter volume go down (note this is volume of matter that's observed, not number of neurons.. at least for a good good while)
(though they say 'neuro toxicity' it's a load of unsubstantiated crap)
Oddly, new research has shown that neurons migrate to points of higher entropy to solve problems then migrate back again if their not needed, possibly self terminating if there really not needed. Also that memory's are related to density...
People with Schizophrenia (all 7-8 of the ones I know personally any how)... all have a penchant for the origin... (there are some questions you can ask them to get more specific's on this, and they do have in-site into it... but that's for me to publish)...
That would also relate to and increase in white / brown matter as the entropy of thought was on those areas (origin and difficulty connecting them).
What they do is give people pills that make them chronically retarded and ignorant (hey ignorance is bliss) and oddly when you try to stop the brain working it seems to fix things (bullets in the head also have this effect and less patients have complained).... There is an 'ethical' (NEURO TOXICITY) ban on doing any research into any kind of alternative treatments (like 'stress reduction, education, meditation techniques, progression etc...).. in-fact they try to put people on them at even the slightest whiff on anything that may turn them into the next John Nash (since we can't go giving Nobel Prizes to any more mad people)
Only other real indicators are 'stress' very strong correlation and mioline (Lorenzo save me and my bad spelling)... and frontal lobe...
The frontal lobe is strongly related to 'mirror nurons' (look that up, recently released info) that basically relate to your sense of self and other people. Also related to psychopathy (ASPD)
Recently rejection [I don't think your ideas are worthy, F-] has been directly linked to the area of the brain that pain from heat is linked to.
Lack of miolin makes your brain work slower, so quite why their using that as a treatment method when it's an indicator fuck only knows...
Spliff also make you more focused and less stressed.... Well according to everyone I know who smokes them... I wonder what the link could be, relative number (not strength) of doses compared to peers (liked more) is the only link they've found to the cure for cancer.
On a side line:
If you know any political/world history more than the last century... look up stress testing or pyramid saving schemes.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
I've known a couple of people with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and when they were in the middle of an episode, they would often recall trivial details from the past and incorporate them into what they were talking about. It was actually a little unnerving, sometimes, and I'm someone who tends to remember trivial details better than most people. I didn't really make the "eidetic memory" connection until reading this article. I always assumed that it was just a random sampling of trivia that they had remembered like that. I can easily imagine a brain getting overwhelmed if they're actually dealing with a flood of information at that level of detail.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
Go ask one of them they've got that in-site at least.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a positive trait or a gift. It's a brain disease, and brain diseases produce lots of suffering at the deepest possible level. As someone who knows people with brain diseases I can tell you that "hyperlearning", in the same sense of "hyperlexia" do not qualify as gifts, even though they might seem to because they have the prefix 'hyper-' in them. The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information, while throwing out other, less salient information, is central to its ability to function and perform basic tasks in the world. Without these abilities self-sufficiency and quality of life diminish precipitously.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
As someone who knows people with brain diseases
Who doesn't?
The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information
This was concentrating on forgetting / ignoring, IOW what eidetics don't do. That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring == determining relevance.
You ignore and quickly forget the information that isn't relevant and retain and think about that information that is is. Eidetic memory would allow them to retain all the information but still ignore what didn't matter. If they needed to, they could pull up what colour shoes they wore at age 12, but they would be able to determine that this information was "not important". Hyperlearning says that schizophrenia prevents this so that you can't tell the difference in importance between what you had for lunch last week and what you got on your last math test. This means that your brain is overloading itself trying to figure our WHY all these things matter and piece together connections between them when it shouldn't be.
Re:Eidetic hosts simply make no assumptions. (Score:2)
Ok. Well, I wasn't going to say this, but it's not just people I know. I have a brain disease, myself. It's not schizophrenia or being eidetic but it's very much a perceptual/memory problem.
I would not consider it a gift. I'm not by any means arguing on behalf of discriminating against the neurologically ill. What I am for is recognizing that these illnesses do have a negative impact on quality of life (though this is not to say for everyone, but I do speak for myself in this regard.)
Re:Eidetic hosts simply make no assumptions. (Score:2)
Let me add: the brain is so complex that it's not really amenable to generalizations. Therefore, I was mistaken in generalizing or seeming to speak for others, and I apologize.
Re:Eidetic hosts simply make no assumptions. (Score:2)
wait, am I the parent poster? are you using the royal we? or are you talking about the person I'm responding to?
Neither I nor my parent claimed to have a brain disease, though he claimed to know someone who did, so I assume you're talking to him. Also, you're very hard to read, which is hurting your claim to superior debate skills. Comprehension is important in debates.
I think we all argue with ourself/talk to people who aren't really there. It's something that society tends to associate with mental illness but really, it's just internal dialogue/daydreams which some of us happen to do out loud without realizing it. And it's hardly a scam, my uncle was schizophrenic and left to his own devices he went missing for years and wandered the streets until he lost a leg to frostbite. That's how I first saw him when I was a child. On a hospital bed, with a bandaged stump, barely able to string a sentence together. My grandmother had it too, refused to leave the house for the last 10 years of her life. She was apparently afraid of what was out there, thought there were men out to get her. I think the percentage of Schizophrenics who could function in society is very low.
Either paranoia or disordered thought gets most of them in the end.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
This was concentrating on forgetting / ignoring, IOW what eidetics don't do. That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
Well, from the blurb with the article, that's the hypothesis:
The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters.
Which, presumably, is the point of this exercise, i.e. infecting computers with schizophrenia (am I the only one who feels this is horribly wrong on many levels?).
I'll go now and read tfa.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
I think it pretty much is. 'Forgetting/remembering' at the neurological level is an emergent property of millions of neurons selecting salient information from their incident stimuli. What ends up being encoded into long term memory is a collaboration of each of these neural networks working on their piece of the 'salience' puzzle. The salience can be evaluated in a number of different ways - is it emotionally significant? is it practical information? But, actually, this research concerns even more basic evaluations, such as 'What are the basic grammatical structures in this sentence? What are the words, what are their meanings and how are they arranged? What is the content of the sentence as a whole?" If the wrong information is thrown out *or* remembered, it becomes very difficult for the brain to make sense of it.
So forgetting/remembering are, in many ways, the same thing. In the process of remembering, we have to forget, or our memories quickly become incoherent.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
It sounds more logical that schizophrenia is more associated with the brains dream function activates and slips into the conscious state. Dreams are of course a learning function, where recent and potential future sense and emotional states are compared to past sense and emotional states in order to take actions that will resolve to more beneficial states. Where dreams start to leak in conscious thinking ie the unreal merging with the real, it becomes very difficult to adjust your thinking and take positive actions, hence a destructive randomness. In affect a corrupted data base that produces bad output as a result of corrupted inputs and queries.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
It sounds more logical that schizophrenia is more associated with the brains dream function activates and slips into the conscious state.
Except that the "dream function" is merely the brain's attempt to continue living in a way, recreating reality when your conscious shuts down and you're no longer consciously receiving sensory input with which to interpret a reality. I'd say that makes it the reverse: The dream state doesn't "[slip] into the conscious state", rather there is a failure to separate imagination from sensory input. It's a subtle difference, but an important one, I think.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
That's would be the brown matter.
White matter tasks, brown matter links. (crudely)...
I know many ignorant people, they make me uneasy.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
Care to test that hypothesis?
Oh when the game theory, oh when the game theory oh when the game theory got me the Nobel prize, I want to be schizophrenic when the game theory got me the Nobel prize.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:3)
There's a tendency by humans to identify some positive trait as horribly negative. After all, the world must be fair and someone gifted must suffer for it, right?
I cannot outright reject "equalising" hypotheses, but I am slow to accept them because they may betray the motivations of the humans behind them.
The story is that these people came up with a possible explanation of how schizophrenia works, came up with a test, and found that the test created a "virtual schizophrenic". Your complaint that this explanation could show schizophrenics in a slightly more positive light doesn't seem relevant.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
" they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful"... Oh there's a bit of a split between the ones who think they should go nuke someone cos that's when their commander and chief does and the ones who think they should save the planet... but
What is meaningful?, shit the researches may possibly have forgotten.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
(BTW it's not ethical to research not putting people on meds as soon as they may possibly, maybe, ohh, quick he can meld)
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:1)
Life is inherently unfair. Some are born smarter than other. Some are born stronger than others. Some are born sick, other are born healthy. Some are taller and some are shorter.
The problem is that trying to "equallize" these doesn't and will never be any more fair. The real issue isn't making it more fair, but rather give people every chance to exceed their reach. Leftwingers don't want to measure anything based on effort, but rather have it based on outcome. And that leads to all sorts of policies that are fundamentally broken.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who lives in a socialist country (well, we ALL live in socialist countries to some extend, but a most socialist one than the US), I disagree. The goal ISN'T to "give people every chance to exceed their reach", as you put it, but to make sure people can always pick themselves up and keep contributing to society. To make it so that when life isn't fair it isn't as bad as it could be and it isn't the end. If you lose everything, you still have access to health care, to shelter, to services to help you find a job and work to get it back.
EI exists so that, if you lose your job, you won't find yourself on the street if you can't find a new one before next month's rent it due. Public healthcare is there so that if you're only making minimum wage, and you develop a heart condition, you won't die from a lack of funds to fix it. Education subsidization lets you develop skills to let you better your own life and at the same time better contribute to society as a whole. Socialism is the mantra of "today you, tomorrow me" restructured into a political system. It's an acknowledgement that everyone in a society is in a symbiotic relationship with everyone else in it and that working together is better than killing each other over every last scrap we can personally get our hands on.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
This is all fine and dandy, until the system makes more excuses as to why more people need more help. Then it crashes under the burden of unsupportable debt. Nobody here in the US wants to touch the bankrupt SS and Medicare systems, which are collapsing under their own weight. Because Seniors Vote.
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
And this coming from an Anonymous Coward. No surprise there. It is easy to be part of a crowd. It is hard to stand out by yourself. See my sig ;)
Re:Hyperlearning (Score:2)
Oh, Not a "christian" either. Nice try
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't quite have schizophrenia, but I do tend to remember a lot and overthink things. Spending time disconnected from digital stimulus (for example, going for a decent walk every day, without bringing your phone) helps give your brain time to process everything.
I'd think the effect of staying always connected is even worse for schizophrenics if this study is correct.
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator! Only took something like a week :p
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Offtopic)
As for your last sentence, I don't think so. Here's the quote at the bottom of my page right now:
Try the Moo Shu Pork. It is especially good today. % Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. % Try to have as good a life as you can under the circumstances. % Try to relax and enjoy the crisis. -- Ashleigh Brilliant % Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you. % Tuesday After Lunch is the cosmic time of the week. % Tuesday is the Wednesday of the rest of your life. % What happened last night can happen again. % While you recently had your problems on the run, they've regrouped and are making another attack. % Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply. % You are a bundle of energy, always on the go. % You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here. % You are a very redundant person, that's what kind of person you are. % You are always busy. % You are as I am with You. % You are capable of planning your future. % You are confused; but this is your normal state. % You are deeply attached to your friends and acquaintances. % You are destined to become the commandant of the fighting men of the department of transportation. % You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend. % You are fairminded, just and loving. % You are farsighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend. % You are fighting for survival in your own sweet and gentle way. % You are going to have a new love affair. % You are magnetic in your bearing. % You are not dead yet. But watch for further reports. % You are number 6! Who is number one? % You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. % You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends. % You are sick, twisted and perverted. I like that in a person. % You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep. % You are standing on my toes. % You are taking yourself far too seriously. % You are the only person to ever get this message. % You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of trash. % You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity. % You can create your own opportunities this week. Blackmail a senior executive. % You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with dirt is concerned. % You can rent this space for only $5 a week. % You could live a better life, if you had a better mind and a better body. % You definitely intend to start living sometime soon. % You dialed 5483. % You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. % You don't become a failure until you're satisfied with being one. % You enjoy the company of other people. % You feel a whole lot more like you do now than you did when you used to. % You fill a much-needed gap. % You get along very well with everyone except animals and people. % You had some happiness once, but your parents moved away, and you had to leave it behind. % You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music. % You have a deep interest in all that is artistic. % You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved. % You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex. % You have a strong appeal for members of your own sex. % You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first. % You have a truly strong individuality. % You have a will that can be influenced by all with whom you come in contact. % You have an ability to sense and know higher truth. % You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself. % You have an unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly. % You have an unusual magnetic personality. Don't walk too close to metal objects which are not fastened down. % You have an unusual understanding of the problems of human relationships. % You have been selected for a secret mission. % You have Egyptian flu: you're going to be a mummy. % You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business. % Y
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator!
You call that fixed?!? I don't know what you're seeing, but over here on my screen, it's currently showing about 200 different quotes all separated by "%". I wouldn't exactly call that "fixed".
I really wish the Slashdot developers would figure out how to set up a separate test environment, rather than just coding directly on the production servers, which seems to be how things are done here.
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator!
You call that fixed?!? I don't know what you're seeing, but over here on my screen, it's currently showing about 200 different quotes all separated by "%". I wouldn't exactly call that "fixed".
It was unstuck and working here about an hour ago. Now, it's completely broken and showing all of the fortunes.
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
It's not all the fortunes.
Matt Welsh is not there!
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Right now for me its displaying a huge block of fortune file type text, I assume it is displaying the first fortune, then going right passed the % and keeps going till it hits a limit. Well its way better than lemmings, that quote was old the first day.
Re: Rember a lot! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Uh, the fortune cookie generator exploded on me.
Meanwhile, Hi Mods. this is On Topic because this is what TFA says being schizophrenic and unable to forget is like!
Here we go!
--
Try the Moo Shu Pork. It is especially good today. % Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. % Try to have as good a life as you can under the circumstances. % Try to relax and enjoy the crisis. -- Ashleigh Brilliant % Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you. % Tuesday After Lunch is the cosmic time of the week. % Tuesday is the Wednesday of the rest of your life. % What happened last night can happen again. % While you recently had your problems on the run, they've regrouped and are making another attack. % Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply. % You are a bundle of energy, always on the go. % You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here. % You are a very redundant person, that's what kind of person you are. % You are always busy. % You are as I am with You. % You are capable of planning your future. % You are confused; but this is your normal state. % You are deeply attached to your friends and acquaintances. % You are destined to become the commandant of the fighting men of the department of transportation. % You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend. % You are fairminded, just and loving. % You are farsighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend. % You are fighting for survival in your own sweet and gentle way. % You are going to have a new love affair. % You are magnetic in your bearing. % You are not dead yet. But watch for further reports. % You are number 6! Who is number one? % You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. % You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends. % You are sick, twisted and perverted. I like that in a person. % You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep. % You are standing on my toes. % You are taking yourself far too seriously. % You are the only person to ever get this message. % You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of trash. % You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity. % You can create your own opportunities this week. Blackmail a senior executive. % You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with dirt is concerned. % You can rent this space for only $5 a week. % You could live a better life, if you had a better mind and a better body. % You definitely intend to start living sometime soon. % You dialed 5483. % You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. % You don't become a failure until you're satisfied with being one. % You enjoy the company of other people. % You feel a whole lot more like you do now than you did when you used to. % You fill a much-needed gap. % You get along very well with everyone except animals and people. % You had some happiness once, but your parents moved away, and you had to leave it behind. % You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music. % You have a deep interest in all that is artistic. % You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved. % You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex. % You have a strong appeal for members of your own sex. % You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first. % You have a truly strong individuality. % You have a will that can be influenced by all with whom you come in contact. % You have an ability to sense and know higher truth. % You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself. % You have an unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly. % You have an unusual magnetic personality. Don't walk too close to metal objects which are not fastened down. % You have an unusual understanding of the problems of human relationships. % You have been selected for a secret mission. % You have Egyptian flu: you're going to be a
Re: Rember a lot! (Score:1)
One more reason to be wary of any organization excessively collecting data. One day they will become schizophrenic, if they aren't already.
Unexpected implications (Score:2, Funny)
"which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would."
So the fact that it sometimes takes me twenty minutes to find my keys in the morning is a sign that I'm sane? That's oddly comforting.
Re:Unexpected implications (Score:2)
It just mean that you have a different mental disease.
Re:Unexpected implications (Score:1)
Re:Unexpected implications (Score:1)
This should be easy to fix (Score:2, Funny)
Just tell the Schizophrenics the hop count of their crazy idea is 16. Yet another problem solved with poison reverse.
Re:This should be easy to fix (Score:2)
Re:This should be easy to fix (Score:2)
Re:This should be easy to fix (Score:2)
No it refers to actually increasing the hop count and telling your neighbors about it. You increase it to infinity, which is 16 in RIP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_poisoning [wikipedia.org]
River Tam. (Score:1)
While the actual terms were likely off -- "stripped her amygdala" doesn't make a lot of sense -- this sounds like exactly what River Tam is supposed to have.
Teaching this to computers doesn't seem like a great idea, though. "This was a triumph" indeed.
Schizo computers a victory. (Score:1)
Artificial human intelligence at last!!!
very good info (Score:1)
so a schizo computer would... (Score:2)
Maybe: /tmp
% rm
I"m sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
First link is quite entertaining read (Score:2)
"In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing."
Interesting methodology. I doubt though that it has a relationship to real schizo.
Cool so installing Windows makes one a Scientist (Score:2)
Cool so installing Windows makes one a Scientist
Joker? (Score:1)
Re:Joker? (Score:2)
I assume they studied the brains of schizophrenics, found they were producing a lot more dopamine than normal and then tried to figure out what that would do to a person based on what purposes dopamine serves and what symptoms could possibly be caused by those purposed going into overdrive.
Re:Joker? (Score:3)
It's been pretty well established that schizophrenics are rarely truly incapable of communication, just that frequently they encode the messages in an ad hoc register known only to them. I remember my abnormal psych book quoting patients that had been doing that prior to treatment. I've found that it's been fairly accurate in the limited number of people I've met that communicate like that. But if you've got access to the code book you can often times decode the speech. It's not easy because it requires a lot of working memory, but the speech is usually not completely incomprehensible. Of course it really depends which type of schizophrenia you're referring to.
The communication style itself depends heavily upon a large memory capacity and increased ability to infer meaning. I don't personally have enough experience dealing with folks with schizophrenia to really know how accurate that perception is, but my observations would definitely be consistent with that.
I also spent a period schizoaffective and my memory back then was a lot better than it is now. I'd rarely if ever forget anything, and I'm still haunted by that. It's inherently unsettling to find that somebody you sat on the same bus with several months previous has been gunned down in a murder suicide.
I wouldn't care to suggest a causal relation there, but as my social interactions improved my memory eventually started to diminish. Oddly enough, I also started to dream at night rather than during the day.
I don't think so! (Score:2)
Re:I don't think so! (Score:1)
Is the origin of something exceptionally important to you.. like seeing is believing?
If 20 people told you someone was a untrustworthy but all you'd seen for yourself was that they where, would you give them the benefit of the doubt based on what you'd seem yourself. likewise the opposite.
I've done that for years.... (Score:2)
It's called installing Windows Me.
Actually windows 95 and 98 were not much better....
Shmoocon (Score:2)
OK I'll go read TFA now.
I'm sorry, Dave... (Score:2)
... I'm afraid I can't help you with your research on schizophrenia....
Re:I'm sorry, Dave... (Score:1)
Neal Stephenson wrote a short story about this... (Score:2)
It's really quite excellent -- and vaguely linked to his Cryptonomicon universe...
http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html [vanemden.com]
I've heard something like that before (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the summary a bit confusing, though. What I have heard before is that the schizophrenic brain is poor at filtering out stimuli, meaning that unimportant details will stand out as much as important ones. For instance, it might have trouble filtering out ambient noise, so whereas a normal brain will cut off processing early on, a schizophrenic brain will process the noise the same way it would process salient, meaningful sounds. So what might happen is that the phoneme processing part of the brain will receive ambient noise as input and will make out voices and whispers out of it, because that is its job, and then these will be manipulated and interpreted as a conversation - maybe neighbors plotting against you, because why else would you be paying attention?
Stimuli that should never make it past saliency processing get dispatched to the brain, which assumes that if it got this far, it must be meaningful (this is normally a fair assumption). From then on, it will "learn" to find meaning in noise, hence visual or auditive hallucinations, delusions, etc. From what I can gather, this study shows that an excess of dopamine could inhibit normal filtering functions, hence the "hyperlearning" on stimuli that should be thrown out, but isn't.
Re:I've heard something like that before (Score:1)
Both are known for 'black and white' thinking, and loads of trippy shit. the schizophrenics just get attached to it. (if they believe in themselves)... My mate got attached to his laptop... man and machine... you'd think you where molesting him if you went near it.... would only let one person sort it out for him.... he knew why. Quite sane, certainly more sane than Ayn Rand.
Re:I've heard something like that before (Score:2)
Actually, I have an issue like this that makes me very uncomfortable around crowds. For example, when I go to a restaurant, I can hear every conversation going on around me with the same relevance as someone sitting next to me. It drives me nuts because it prevents me from enjoying a conversation with the people I actuslly care about. In that situation, I either have to process everything at once and parse out the stuff relevant to who I'm trying to talk to, or block out everything as white noise and not participate at all. I also get a bit nauseated from dealing with so much info at one time.
Needless to say, I don't go out much and prefer to be in locations where I control the environment. Usually keeping things dark and quiet.
Re:I've heard something like that before (Score:3)
Someone spoke on the phone is a South Asian language that was "ambient noise". Why didn't I think that Indian lady was plotting against me?
1) GP was talking about people with a brain dysfunction. That is to say, whose heads are not functioning normally. That said...
2) You don't think she's plotting against you because you have no reason to suspect so. If you'd been hearing unintelligible whispers all day, hushed voices in every shadowy nook along your route to work, and they seemed to sound much like her voice as you hear it on the train, you might consciously suspect that you were being followed and begin becoming paranoid, especially if you had begun to panic earlier in the day (violent sounds and then what sounds like laughter, or other evidence of being hunted/tailed, etc). If your anxiety really begins to rise, it can be very easy for conscious logic to fall by the wayside. If this happens every day for months, you could be a goner.
Which is to say, one or two faulty parts in a brain can be enough to screw you up. Aside from thinking you hear whispers (and other paranoid affectations), you'd be just the same as you are now, only you have reason to suspect things that just plain aren't true, and you can't find a way to go back to where you were before you started hearing them, because it's a brain affectation and not a mental one (presumably).
Re:I've heard something like that before (Score:2)
The brain is not monolithic, it is comprised of many parts and many layers that communicate with each other. I might have spoken vaguely, but the basic idea is that irrelevant stimuli is reaching parts of the brain that should not be receiving them, due to failures in the gateways that are supposed to filter them out or redirect them to parts of the brain that are meant to deal with noise. All these gateways are technically part of the brain, but it makes sense in my mind to separate the "routing" subsystems of the brain from the "processing" subsystems.
In your example, you could imagine that stimuli is routed through many places in your brain, including filters that will make a very rough analysis of the signal and determine whether you are hearing a language you can understand. Thanks to these filters, the language processing part of your brain will receive in priority all the English sounds, and the South Asian sounds will be blocked from being processed that way. You still hear Hindi, but the autopilot that analyzes English and other languages you know is never triggered. Over time, your brain might carve a subconscious circuit that will automatically notify you that "Hindi is being spoken", but that will be a separate circuit that does not interfere with others. Until you actually learn Hindi, the core "language and meaning processing" module of your brain simply never sees it.
In the case of a schizophrenic person, the Hindi might get through to English language processing, and that part of the brain, which normally operates under the handy assumption that it is analyzing English, will make them hear sentences that are a loose compromise between fitting the noise and being coherent. In general, the brain is comprised of many highly specialized parts that do an excellent job at analyzing certain particular kinds of data. In order for it to work as smoothly as possible, data has to be routed smartly and parsimoniously so that the right kind of data is given to the parts that are specialized for it. The idea is that letting spurious signals seep through to the parts of your brain that analyze salient events = schizophrenia. In other words, a schizophrenic brain, in some sense, might inadvertently assume it knows Hindi, because language-like signals indiscriminately fall through to meaning analysis, without the safeguards normal brains have. Obviously, it will do a catastrophic job at understanding it, but it might not have the resources it needs to figure out there is a problem at this level, so it will "adapt" in somewhat random ways, paving the way to even deeper troubles and madness.
Re:I've heard something like that before (Score:2)
I like you're analogy. It makes sense to me. However schizophrenia is not well understood and is a term used for many different issues. If only people could be treated in a logical way! They cannot as every one is different.
As for cochlear implants... they are not advised for adults in the UK. It is difficult for them to learn how it works. Brain function, learning the neural connections to be able to use it is not easy and takes progressively longer as you get older. They are normally only provided to kids. Sprogs learn how to use them very rapidly.
Speaking of computers with schizophrenia... (Score:2)
Re:Speaking of computers with schizophrenia... (Score:2)
Looks fine to me. Say, when's your next appointment with your psychiatrist?
So, it's the opposite of Amnesia? (Score:2)
Yes, I know it's not THE opposite, but that's what it sounds like to me.
BTW, what's with the 5000 fortune cookies showing up in the footer of slashdot?!?
Forgetting dreams (Score:2)
The problem with schizo people is not that they have too many "normal" memories. But that they remember too much of the "wrong" things.
Have you ever woken up from a dream, and had difficulty, at least for a few moments, figuring out what is real and what is not? After those few moments, your mind clears, and you realize that your dream made no sense at all, and you wonder how you could have ever thought it was real. By the time you finish breakfast, the dream is forgotten.
This is what schizophrenia is like. Except your mind doesn't clear, you don't forget, and you don't stop dreaming when you wake up. I think the cure to schizophrenia will come when we find the brain's "time to wake up" switch, and figure out why it doesn't always work.
Re:Forgetting dreams (Score:3)
Schizophrenia simplified for dogma-logic[1+1...=0] (Score:2)
Schizophrenia is a chronic physical (brain) illness, due to brain (nature/nurture) structure and/or chemistry.
To compare schizophrenia a human malady to fycked-up technology application is sick. Texas universities probably have creationist classes and students believing amazon, sony, and pc/tablet crash, because it is godddd's will. As always, "Reality is self-induced hallucination."
If a university wants to model a schizophrenic state using technology after we have proof of the physical causes, then there is some research value.
Schizophrenia is a physical illness just like kidney stones, cancer, flu.... The insurance companies are happy to call it a mental illness to avoid providing lifetime coverage of a transient or chronic physical condition.
IMO: I am not a MHP/researcher, about one in three people have transient schizophrenic states (many politicians, C*Os, clerics) that allow them to excel at social skills and fail often with moral/ethic situations [they can always blame someone or godddd].
Re:Schizophrenia simplified for dogma-logic[1+1... (Score:2)
Re:Schizophrenia simplified for dogma-logic[1+1... (Score:2)
Ontologically a body-problem that is an irrational dogmatic problem.
"The dogma affected will never reason effective." One in three godmatics significantly weights in favor of poor (possibly insane) policy/decisions....
I am never sure, I reason effective, but avoiding dogma (political/cultural...) helps my reasoning confidence.
Thanks
Re:Schizophrenia simplified for dogma-logic[1+1... (Score:2)
I/O Logic for "hyperlearning" "learning" to occur there are two requirements acquisition and application.
IOW: Acquisition of knowledge/experience with no skills to apply knowledge/experience cannot be learning. All learning requires test/eval application of the knowledge/experience acquired. Learning can be theoretical/abstract/art... and/or applied/practical/task... and provide value to at least the learner.
So, "hyperlearning" does not exist for persons in a fugue/schizophrenic state. They cannot apply acquired knowledge/experience and are not expected to apply knowledge/experience. A surgeon/engineer that has amnesia and/or schizophrenia cannot appropriately apply the acquired knowledge/experience.
Re:Schizophrenia simplified for dogma-logic[1+1... (Score:2)
I will never be sure that my brain can be physically distinguish from the schizophrenic brain without a return to the early dark-ages (0001ce...2011ce) of mental health.
Forgetting ~~ stabilizing negative feedback? (Score:3)
It sounds like too much remembering induces positive feedback in the brain's pathways which lead to unstable oscillations. Forgetting is then required in order to dampen the system and stabilize it.
If the brain remembers too much, it's possibly not the new stimuli which overwhelm it, but the combination of new stimuli plus the remembered information being replayed, all made worse by feedback paths.
Just a wild-assed hypothesis.
Connectionism and encoding meaning (Score:1)
I posted the following comment on neuroskeptic about this article:
`"Noteworthy was the high frequency of agent-slotting exchanges between the hospital boss, Joe, and the Mafia boss, Vito, and parallel confusions between the “I” self-reference and underling Mafia members, suggesting generalization of boss/underling relationships."
For the model to recognize these types of relationships, the authors would have had to explicitly tag these agents as possessing either these qualities the constituent elements of these qualities. In either case, it's easy to imagine post-hoc biases in the model's "memory encoder" that generate just-so results without actually reflecting the biological or theoretical underpinnings.
How these relationships are assessed by the "memory encoder" and the "story parser" has much to do with the way features are associated with lexemes. From http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?miikkulainen:phd [utexas.edu]:
"Processing in DISCERN is based on hierarchically-organized backpropagation modules, communicating through a central lexicon of word representations. The lexicon is a double feature map, which transforms the orthographic word symbol into its semantic representation and vice versa."`
(http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/04/schizophrenic-computer.html)
A judgement of this article depends largely on whether the parser assigns meaning with a result (at the very least, or, given that the goal is to model schizophrenia, in a way) that's compatible with the output (or processes) of human linguistic cognition.
Silly model of "hyperlearning" (Score:1)
Photographic memories (Score:1)
HAL? (Score:1)
Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:1)
Violets are Blue...
I'm schizophrenic....
And so am I.......
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:2)
Do these "many schizophrenics" have names? Do you have photos of them?
Could it be possible they are all you?
I have schizophrenia. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:1)
They give people dissassociative anesthetics to help them get over those kind of 'nagging' problems, well sometimes.... other's just buy them on the street corner.
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:2)
You are correct. The term "schizophrenia" means "split mind," and it is probably that misnomer that causes the confusion.
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which both refer to the same thing, is in every case I am aware of caused by a severely traumatic experience. It is a completely different phenomenon and an utterly fascinating one from both a psychological and physiological perspective. There are changes in the body that are very difficult to explain with conventional theories of how mind affects body--from mildly interesting ones like differing allergies to the startling changes in visual acuity as seen here [youtube.com].
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:4, Informative)
Schizoprenia and multiple personality *slash* dissociative identity disorder are two completely different things.
I realize, of course, that you didn't write the joke, but you did repeat it.
This is how is should read:
Roses are Red...
Violets are Blue
I'm schizophrenic...
And I wish that duck outside my window would quit reading my mind . . .
Re:Brings to mind the old verse.... (Score:2)
Geez, lighten up Francis...
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:3)
I don't think that they're saying that episodic memory improves from hyper-learning. A 'normal' brain throws out most of the information it receives in the process of highlighting the important, useful information that's incident on the brain's circuitry. Because of this ability, the brain is able to create a coherent narrative for itself.
The scientists are saying that, in schizophrenic brains, what ends up being remembered is not this useful information. Instead, the wrong information is selected by the neural circuits such that the wrong information ends up encoded in long-term memory. This information is selected as being just as important, or even more important, in the episodic 'story' than practical information, such as, for example, the reminders that you point out they forget. The end result is that the long-term memories end up being incoherent.
So it's an issue of hyper-learning everything, not just what's important. If it was simply increased salience for what was important, that would be usefully improved memory. Also, while the symptoms of schizophrenia that you point out are correct, those are the outward psychological symptoms. These scientists are exploring what happens neurologically, at the level of individual neurons.
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:2)
The Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia result in Apathy, Lack of Motivation, and General Disorganized Thinking. Those patients I know who have this illness DON'T remember many things. In fact, they require regular "reminders" of the things that they ought to remember. I think this Notion that people who have this Illness "never forget" is not founded in fact. There is no evidence to support this hypothesis or notion.
That needn't be a contradiction. It could be just the same as in the physical world: The more stuff you keep, the harder it gets to find the stuff you want. If there's nothing else on your table, the paper saying "don't forget to buy a birthday present for $SOMEONE" will stand out, and every time you look at the table, you'll be reminded of this. OTOH, if the table is full of different papers, you'll likely not notice that one with the important reminder on it. It's almost as if it weren't there.
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:2)
You realize that negative symptom form and positive symptom form of schizophrenia can be completely different in their underlying physical causes and are only the same desease in the minds of the psychiatrist/psychologist? You realize that the old person with an atrophied brain and a young person with a chemical imbalance show different symptoms of schizophrenia because they don't have the same desease? One has negative symptoms because he is missing large portions of brain tissue and the other has positive symptoms because his intact brain is not working correctly. Both are called "schizophrenia" even though they are different illnesses.
You do realize we are still in a dark age when it comes to psychiatry, right?
You do? Good. I was just checking.
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:2)
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:2)
I don't think they are necessarily writing about large-scale organized memory, like learning.
But perhaps small-scale memories in groups of brain cells?
For instance, suppose you hear a bell ring briefly, but then after it stops, you continue to hear an intense memory of it in your head as a kind of after image, which mixes in with new sounds that you are hearing.
The result is chaos.
Re:REALITY: SCHIZOPHRENIA REDUCES MEMORY (Score:1)
I remembered crying as a baby the other day (the actual crying, my brain was confused and distressed but I worked it out in the end and got over it... good job I can learn my way over it)... still got a tad of chronic pain left, but I think a few transformers, a 9v battery and some back EMF should teach me that pain isn't a sensible emotional response.
Re:At least it's not Alzhemier... (Score:2)
What's next, computers with dementia? Wait, computer virus has already turned computers into Alzheimer patients... :P
Why not. If you can perfectly replicate the problem, you now have a better understanding of what the problem is, and a way to test for possible solutions.
Re:Hyperlearning? (Score:2)
No, only eight, of which I am one. I know because I hyperlearned it.