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 Schizophrenic patients' emotions tend to become altered (for example, they can be unemotional and withdrawn or violent and aggressive) due to shifts in the affective network.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?