Alanna

Morton


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

IQ at its Highest: Schizophrenia


The debate on whether or not schizotypal individual is considered to be genius is
a huge controversy. What is the connection between schizophrenia and genius? A stigma
associated with schizophrenia is that those with the disease are insane. Insanity is defined
as the state of being severely 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.
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. (Ramey) In other words, this proves that there is a stigma with
schizophrenia that involves people believing that schizotypal individuals only experience
negative symptoms. Schizophrenics experience cognitive deficits and impairments of the
emotional drive, 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 GermanAmerican 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.
(Frankfurt) This means that from a study performed on mice, researchers were able to see
an increased amount of dopamine in the midbrain, which affects emotional and cognitive
behavior in schizophrenics. 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 depends on the current chemistry going on in their
brain and the medication being used by the individual to determine the will power they
struggle to win over to fight all of the false reality that they face. In a sense,


schizophrenics have stronger will power because they can ignore the abnormal reality
their brain has stirred up into becoming reality.

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 his self-inflicted social isolation and need to succeed, he appears to
unconsciously access his inactive madness and proceeds to create a false reality to give
him the steadiness he needs 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 and used it to engage in his mathematical thought process. As
Russell, B. (1996). The Conquest of Happiness said, One of the symptoms of an
approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important (61)
(Griffith) 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?
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 means that an schizotypal individual
with a major lack of emotion is unresponsive or unchanged after receiving psychopharmaceutical drugs. They are more likely to behave more sanely, however their
emotional drive and responsiveness will decrease. 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. (Frankfurt) "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. (Frankfurt)
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 between-subjects


design. More specifically, the medications 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 effective. It was found
that atypical antipsychotic medications effectively treat schizophrenics more efficiently
than psychotic medications. 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, 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. Schizophrenics brain activity
is obviously different in comparison to someone without the mental illness. An
schizotypal individual thinks differently, rather they think more complexly. They
interpret and see things differently than the average person, mostly because of their
negative symptoms including hallucinations and delusions. This is why the average
schizophrenic has a higher likeliness of accessibility to creativeness.
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. (Griffith) The 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. (Griffith)
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. (Ramey) 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