Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:06:31
I'm sure that other people have already postulated this idea, but after experiencing a very mild bit of psychosis last night, it occurred to me that full blown psychosis, such as is seen in schizophrenia, might just be a manifestation of a process that is active in everyone, but is typically highly regulated, and whose function is to generate "new" ideas (or images/music,etc). Being a programmer, I tend to view the brain as being constrained to the same informational limitations as computers. Given that it is simply matter, it isn't imbued with the ability to generate novel information (that which is not an inhernet property of it's structure). I imagine that perhaps the brain simply (like a computer) scans all of it's input for patterns, constantly, and on a subconcious basis. Many of the patterns it "sees" are incorrect (there isn't really a pattern), and these are typically discarded. However, in people with brain anomalies, such as inherent dysfunction (schizophrenia), or drug induced dysfunction, these ideas aren't fully suppressed, and are given relevance by the higher centers of the brain. Precisely because this is unusual, the patterns that result aren't typical (i.e., they are novel). It seems that schizophrenia occurs in a relatively high frequency of people relative to its debilitating features. It's as if evolution has given this flaw a pass, because at a low level, it can serve a useful function in an intelligent, social species.
It's obvious that the typical schizophrenic isn't very utilitarian, however, so I wondered what would govern the gradient of "functionality." There must be an executive, or "logical" center of the brain that allows some such people to evaluate psychotic ideas, and discard incorrect ones (much like a higher order version of the subconcious process). This deferral of the lower order to higher order evaluation would allow more patterns to be evaluated by the individual, with the more "rational" persons being able to successfully recognize quality ideas, and the less rational appearing simply more disorganized (by presenting poor ideas).
As to why some people are more rational, I originally had several ideas, but ultimately found them unsatisfying. It is rationality, however, that I would define as intelligence, and psychosis that I would define as creativity. I suspect that other central building blocks of the brain would be loosely define as gradients of emotion (which supplies motivation/restraint) and activation (which determines the level of overall activity).
Psychotic creativities might also be divided into the specific senses they are genereated from (auditory, visual, verbal, etc), explaining the various fields of creative accomplishment.
Anyway, I was pleased with my ideas, and had to put them in writing. Any thoughts?
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:1117
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1117.html