https://edge.org/response-detail/10936
Psychological Disorders Fall On A Spectrum With Symptoms Being More Severe Or Less Severe And We All Have Them With Symptoms Being Stronger In Some People Than They Are In Others.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Altruism-Origins-Kindness/dp/0393339998
Mark Price's Relative Had A Severe Case Of Psychoticism. I Have A Less Severe Case Of Psychoticism (I'm On The Lower End Of The Psychoticism Spectrum). Check Eysenck's Out: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/creativity-and-eysencks-psychoticism.html
http://www.science20.com/rogue_neuron/creativity_crime_passion
ON THE VERGE OF PSYCHOTIC
Now Run Along!
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20141229/GJOPINION_0102/141229503/0/SEARCH
Personality trait or mental disorder? The same genes may weigh in on both
Robert Sapolsky - Schizophrenia, genetic and environmental influences
....
Schizophrenia is about equally common all over the world and in all ethnic groups, occurring at the rate of about one case per hundred people. It takes much the same form in Australian Aborigines and the Inuit. This is unusual; many genetically influenced diseases are either peculiar to certain ethnic groups or much commoner in one group than another. It implies perhaps that the mutations that predispose some human beings to schizophrenia are ancient, having occurred before the ancestors of all non-Africans left Africa and fanned out across the world. Since being schizophrenic is hardly conducive to survival, let alone to successful parenthood, in a Stone Age world, this universality is puzzling: why have the genetic mutations not died out?
Many people have noticed that schizophrenics seem to appear in successful and intelligent families. (Such an argument led Henry Maudsley, a British contemporary of Kraepelin, to reject eugenics, because he realized that sterilizing those with a taint of mental illness would wipe out a lot of geniuses, too.) People with a mild version of the disorder - as noted earlier, these are sometimes called "schizotypal" people - are often unusually brilliant, self-assured, and focused. As Galton put it, "I have been surprised at finding how often insanity has appeared among the near relatives of exceptionally able men."
This eccentricity may even help them achieve success. It is perhaps no accident that many great scientists, leaders, and religious prophets seem to walk the crater rim of the volcano of psychosis, and to have relatives with schizophrenia. James Joyce, Albert Einstein, Carl Gustav Jung, and Bertrand Russell all had close relatives with schizophrenia. Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant might both be described as "schizotypal." One absurdly precise study estimates that 28 percent of prominent scientists, 60 percent of composers, 73 percent of painters, 77 percent of novelists, and an astonishing 87 percent of poets have shown some degree of mental disturbance. As John Nash the Princeton mathematician, said after recovering from 30 years of schizophrenia and accepting a Nobel Prize for his work on game theory, the interludes of rationality between his psychosis episodes were not welcome at all. "Rational thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos."
The psychiatrist Randolph Neese of Michigan speculates that schizophrenia may be an example of an evolutionary "cliff effect," in which the mutation in different genes are all beneficial, except when they all come together in one person, or evolve just too far, at which point they suddenly combine to produce a disaster. Gout is a "cliff disease" of this kind. High levels of uric acid in the joints protect human beings from premature aging, but a few people get too much of it and painful crystals of the stuff form in their joints. Perhaps schizophrenia is the result of too much of a good thing: too many genetic and environmental factors that are usually good for brain function all coming together in one individual. This would explain why the genes predisposing people to schizophrenia do not die out; so long as they do not combine, they each benefit the survival of the carrier.
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns On Nurture. Ridley, p. 111, 121-123.
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/16/165149933/mental-disorders-and-evolution-what-would-darwin-say-about-schizophrenia
Q: You say at the beginning of your paper that "psychiatric disorders have long puzzled researchers by defying the expectations of natural selection." Why?
A: It's particularly the case with schizophrenia, which in this paper and in many other papers has been shown to be a disorder that drastically reduces your fecundity — the number of kids you have. It's often referred to as reduced fertility but, strictly speaking, people with schizophrenia aren't infertile. It's just that they're less often likely to find a partner and have kids.
Schizophrenia is estimated to have a heritability of around 80 percent. Same is true for autism. So if these disorders are very heavily influenced by genes, but the people who have the disorders are less likely to pass on their genes, why aren't the disorders becoming less common in the population?
http://psychneuro.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/evolutionary-advantage-to-schizophrenia/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-may-favor-schizophrenia-genes/
Q: You say at the beginning of your paper that "psychiatric disorders have long puzzled researchers by defying the expectations of natural selection." Why?
A: It's particularly the case with schizophrenia, which in this paper and in many other papers has been shown to be a disorder that drastically reduces your fecundity — the number of kids you have. It's often referred to as reduced fertility but, strictly speaking, people with schizophrenia aren't infertile. It's just that they're less often likely to find a partner and have kids.
Schizophrenia is estimated to have a heritability of around 80 percent. Same is true for autism. So if these disorders are very heavily influenced by genes, but the people who have the disorders are less likely to pass on their genes, why aren't the disorders becoming less common in the population?
http://psychneuro.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/evolutionary-advantage-to-schizophrenia/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-may-favor-schizophrenia-genes/
...In 1987 Daniel Weinberger argued that schizophrenia was unlike other brain disorders in that the cause was no longer there when the symptoms appeared. The damage had been done much earlier but became apparent only because of some later, normal brain maturation process: the early effects are "unmasked" by later development as adulthood approaches. Unlike, say, Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease, schizophrenia is not a disease of brain degeneration but a disease of brain development. For example, during late adolescence and early adulthood the brain is extensively altered. Many of its wires are insulated for the first time, and many of its connections are "pruned": synapses between neurons are cut back , leaving only the strongest ones. Perhaps in schizophrenics either there is too much pruning in the prefrontal cortex in reaction to a failure of the synapses to develop properly many years before, or perhaps too few neurons have migrated or extended to their targets. There will be many genes that mitigate or exacerbate these effect, or possibly respond to them, and they might therefore be called "schizophrenia genes," but they are more like symptoms than causes. It is among the genes affecting the original early development that one must seek for true "causes" of schizophrenia. (It is perhaps no coincidence that schizophrenia appears at the age when young men and women are competing most fiercely to gain a foothold in an unfamiliar adult world and win a mate.)
Most scientists are agreed that in this sense schizophrenia is an organic disease, a disease of development - a disease of the fourth dimension, the dimension of time. It is caused by something going awry in the normal growth and differentiation of the brain. It is another forceful reminder that bodies - and brains - are not made, like model airplanes. They are grown, and that growth is directed by genes. But the genes react to each other, to environmental factors, and to chance events. To say that genes are nature and the rest is nurture is almost certainly wrong. Genes are the means by which nurture expresses itself, just as surely as they are the means by which nature expresses itself.
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns On Nurture. Ridley, p. 117-118.
http://edge.org/
Watch The Video And Then Scroll Down To Where Sarah-Jayne Blakemore Talks About Schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia: Stolen minds, Stolen lives
I'M GOING TO ADD A COUPLE OF PASSAGES FROM "THE BELIEVING BRAIN: FROM GHOSTS AND GODS TO POLITICS AND CONSPIRACIES" CONCERNING SCHIZOPHRENIA. I'M GOING TO DO THIS SOON. SOMETIME SOON.
