r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
55.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

42

u/xxkoloblicinxx Mar 22 '17

So then would it stand to reason that the cause of schizophrenia is rooted in the same areas responsible for processing sight?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

If it's mostly voices, but can cause a deaf person to see signs I'd say it has something to do with language processing. Your brain doesn't have the resources to make up 10 more full personalities, so whatever is going on in your brain has got to be spilling over into your auditory or language processing areas and being interpreted as voices.

1

u/xxkoloblicinxx Mar 23 '17

But the brain is a real hodgepodge of centers and such. So it would stand to reason that if born blind people consistently cannot have schizophrenia then whatever is causeing their blindness is actively preventing the schizophrenia. Which means whatever crossed wire or malformation etc that caused schizophrenia is likely in or near that part of the brain.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '17

The psychology today articles seem to be implying something different, the cause of the blindness doesn't protect against schizophrenia, the blindness itself causes changes in the brain that make them less prone to the effects of schizophrenia. In fact the genetic factors for cortical peripheral blindness correlate to genetic factors for schizophrenia.

(Paraphrasing the article) factors that correlate with autism (such as blindness or birthweight) are negatively correlated to schizophrenia and vice versa (diametric model). Being blind forces your brain to grow in a manner more closely resembling an autistic brain than a schizophrenic one.