Final Project - Part 1

To access my website on schizophrenia & the neural network, go to: http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~ryanma1/index.html.

The creative schizophrenic

While most of us know about the famous mathematician, John Nash (if we've seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind"), how many know that there were a handful of other famous creative and intelligent schizohprenics? To name a few: the Beat Generation writer, Jack Kerouac (to the right), Albert Einstein's son, Eduard, and Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary. Back then, it was common to simply refer to these people as "insane" and offer them the standard treatment: time spent in an asylum. Fortunately, it seems as if the advances of modern science can now offer an array of drugs to combat the symptoms of the disease and to help regulate the patients' warped perceptions as well as drown out the "inner voices" they may hear.

While doing research on this topic, I was surprised to learn that schizophrenia affects all three networks of the brain rather significantly. The recognition network can suffer visual impairment as well as hearing alterations. Due to these, the strategic network may have a difficult time figuring out what cognitive functions one should take. The schizophrenic may alter one's strategies and functions based on what the voice is telling him or her to do. The affective network, however, is the area most significantly impacted because the prefrontal cortex is where the deterioration originates. Schizophrenic patients' emotions tend to become altered (for example, they can be unemotional and withdrawn or violent and aggressive) due to shifts in the affective network.

New research has shown that the beginning stages of schizophrenia occurs when adolescents lose gray matter (or tissue in the parietal regions of the brain). The more tissue lost, the greater the hallucinations and the more severe the devastation is to the three networks. My question is: what makes some schizophrenics so highly intelligent and creative? Is it because they lack the normal brain "censors" (eg: reason, rationalization) that other people have? Since the schizophrenic brain deteriorates gradually over time (some confuse it with regular out-of-control adolescent behavior), what continues to be accessed to allow people like Jack Kerouac to write and jazz musicians to play so well? And how do we know for sure that many of these diagnoses might not be mistaking schizophrenia for regular old depression and/or drug abuse?

Pre-frontal cortex & athletes

In class yesterday, I was compelled by the idea that Olympic athletes potentially mess up their "routine" because of what's going on in their pre-frontal cortex. From what I understood, the athlete's performance is skewed because of the sudden pressure and anxiety they feel from their new environment, thus squelching the possibility of imagining a successful outcome. Like many other spectators, I was particulary interested in what Lindsay Jacobellis was thinking when she "hot-dogged" it (David's term) at the end of her run. Lindsay was a student at Stratton Mountain School when I was a teacher there so I knew her personally and this final move (to show off?) did not seem like "her". It struck me that this is also what Phineas Gage's friends said about him when he suffered his pre-frontal cortex damage! So did Lindsay suffer damage during those final seconds of her run when she decided to jump up and grab her board right before the finish? Or were her neurons releasing so many endorphins that this caused her judgement to be impaired? Either way, when Lindsay walked away with the silver medal, I wondered if maybe she knew something that we didn't. A silver medal recipient tends to be honored and forgotten and maybe this is exactly what her pre-frontal cortex had planned.

Proposal for T560 Course Project

The topic area I would like to investigate for my course project is schizophrenia. I became particularly interested in this disease after teaching a 16 year-old schizophrenic student as a first-year teacher in 1999. Not surprisingly, I was ill-equipped to handle the behavioral problems that accompanied Gavin's schizophrenia. In addition to being unengaged and understimulated in my class, he was also manic-depressive and suicidal. I found that as the school year progressed, my goals for Gavin were less and less about making him learn the subject matter and more about simply making him laugh. Needless to say, the class became very Gavin-centric (it's very hard to ignore a schizophrenic student). After Gavin ran away from home and attempted suicide for the first time that year, I decided to switch gears by taking some of the pressure off of my students and making my Spanish class a more welcoming and enjoyable environment. Completely unaware of any universal design techniques that could have helped Gavin back in 1999, I attempted to make the classroom environment as comedic as possible so that he would want to come back to it day after day.

(While my topic is rather broad right now, I am hoping to narrow it down somewhat to focus more specifically on schizophrenia in adolescents and investigate their predisposition towards depression, outbursts and violence, as well as their tendency to be extremely intelligent and creative individuals. For an interesting article called "The Teenage Brain: Culture and Schizophrenia", see: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode3/cultures/index.html.)