[HN Gopher] No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed...
___________________________________________________________________
No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with
schizophrenia
Author : SZJX
Score : 491 points
Date : 2020-02-12 09:50 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| meroes wrote:
| Maybe the visual center has more trust over auditory or other
| parts of the brain? For example an auditory hallucination is
| easily discounted, but if most people witnessed a visual
| hallucination, they'd question their own sanity because that
| signal is so trustworthy? There's many other explanations just a
| random thought.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| It's an interesting thought. I wonder if the nature of
| schizophrenia isn't particularly conducive (almost binarily so)
| to being "driven" by visual signals.
|
| In my interactions with schizophrenic people (especially when
| untreated), I've witnessed intense and unusual attention (some
| would say obsession) devoted to "patterns" -- I've no other
| word to describe it generally; to paraphrase it: "order or
| regularity in visual, typically geometric or symbolic sequences
| of objects", a particular fascination for certain shapes or
| symbols.
|
| Somehow, at some point in the processing, said patterns acquire
| additional meaning, what I'd call uncanny connections.
| (Schizophrenic people deeply believe that they see how to
| "connect the dots" -- hence a particular tendency for tinfoil
| hatism and other paranoid world views.)
|
| It also seems to work with music and other sensory inputs,
| though, but as you said, it could be that the visual is beyond
| some threshold, or of a particular nature so as to be able to
| trigger the schizophrenic patterns.
|
| There's also this history of violence with the onset of
| schizophrenia, it seems to be an acquired condition notably
| highly correlated with childhood suffering (of abnormal
| magnitude and length), but with possibly typical genetic or
| epigenetic predispositions. This tells us again to search for a
| trigger, and it's interesting that people born blind never seem
| to experience such a triggering, the onset of schizophrenia,
| ever.
|
| But people born blind are also different in many other ways,
| biologically -- notably circadian rythms, etc. I should know
| because although I'm perfectly able to see I experience a few
| but too many of the same kind of second- and third-order
| conditions that blind people have, and that led me to suspect
| it was related to a deficiency of mine in regions of the brain
| related to the processing of light in relation to time (cycles
| of melatonin, hunger, etc; iirc it's generally involving the
| thalamus).
|
| I don't really know what conclusion to make of all this, but I
| feel these are clues, help narrow or focus the solution space.
| INTPenis wrote:
| So what does that imply? That visual sensory input might trigger
| schizophrenia? But that would imply that blind people have
| diminished sensory input. I just don't buy that.
|
| They have a lot of sensory input, perhaps as much as seeing
| people. It's just delivered differently. Try an isolation tank. I
| can totally imagine someone going crazy in one of those.
|
| The original title was even more click-bait. I'm glad it was
| changed before posted here.
| mennis16 wrote:
| Hallucinations are much more commonly auditory in Scz, and
| often language based (deaf Schizophrenic people report
| hallucinating disembodied hands doing sign language). If it is
| a real effect it could possibly have the opposite explanation-
| blind people tend to have compensatory improvements in other
| senses like hearing, so perhaps developmental auditory
| hyposensitivity is a causal factor.
|
| But yeah, while I think the observation is interesting, it is
| hard to conclude much of anything from it.
| Jupe wrote:
| Interesting: https://gizmodo.com/can-deaf-people-hear-
| voices-1675963437
|
| Apparently, deaf people do get Scz, and some even hear
| voices.
| Forgivenessizer wrote:
| But deaf people born blind don't. I'm blaming tinky winky.
| That creature is horrifying.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Light inhibits melatonin release.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circadian_rhythm.svg
|
| Low melatonin levels are correlated with many diseases,
| including cancer and schizophrenia.
|
| > The results indicated that blind women had a 35% reduced risk
| of developing breast cancer. Moreover, women who became totally
| blind prior to age 65 had a 50% reduced risk
| https://news.cancerconnect.com/breast-cancer/blind-women-hav...
|
| Role of Melatonin in Schizophrenia
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676771/
|
| Disappointing that the article doesn't mention melatonin once.
| 6nf wrote:
| Do blind people get less light?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Less light in the retina, yes. But there are different
| types of "blind."
| kingkawn wrote:
| It may only be that what we consider to be schizophrenia in a
| physiologic sense presents entirely different in the blind and is
| unrecognizable despite being present.
| oxymoran wrote:
| What if we could "reboot" a schizophrenic brain through some sort
| of sensory deprivation?
| vintermann wrote:
| One way I've heard schizophrenia described is that it feels
| like sensory deprivation; if you sit in an anechoic chamber for
| hours, you might start to "hear" the things schizophrenics
| experience in minutes instead. Sensory deprivation has been
| used as torture, so this does not sound like something you
| would subject people to unless they were 100% willing and
| motivated.
| andai wrote:
| I recently started going to a spa that has float tanks. It's
| the most relaxing thing in the world, and I highly recommend
| it.
|
| While floating, the body is able to relax completely, and this
| has a profound effect on the mind. It really does feel like a
| reboot.
| newshorts wrote:
| I did one and was completely angry the entire afternoon
| after.
|
| I think I relaxed so much my body had to rebound to my normal
| state of frustration and anxiety.
| joncrane wrote:
| This can definitely happen after things that are supposed
| to be relaxing. The key is to plan your day out so you
| don't do anything stressful right after. (unfortunately you
| probably still have to drive home afterwards)
| kempbellt wrote:
| Laying in a salt bath can also dehydrate you, a lot.
|
| I've felt particularly grumpy after a float session a
| couple of times and was able to remedy this by rehydrating.
| jeromebaek wrote:
| this is hilarious. sorry for laughing
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Do you usually pay by the hour for these services? I'd like
| to try it but am pretty cost-conscious lately.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Usually you do. I was able to try one of them once via a
| Groupon or some such local coupon.
| andai wrote:
| It's about $30 per hour in my area. I'd go every day if it
| were cheaper :)
| retzkek wrote:
| Only half-joking here: inflatable kiddie pool, bag of
| softener salt, and a tarp? Total < $100, brine should keep
| much from growing so I wouldn't think it would need too
| much maintenance.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Reminds me of an episode of House.
|
| For some reason I have doubts that placing a schizophrenic
| person into sensory deprivation is going to have them emerge
| better off. Taking someone that is already out of touch with
| reality and further disconnecting them seems like it would push
| them further into schizophrenia.
| orblivion wrote:
| Even if there's some sort of genetic or environmental barrier,
| you would think that it would happen at least once as a
| misdiagnosis.
| pattisapu wrote:
| I wonder if this points to the problems in the concept of this
| diagnosis.
|
| It has been seriously questioned since World War II as to whether
| schizophrenia is even a disease.
|
| The questioners being mostly from the psychoanalytic school (some
| psychiatrists), all forgotten, may have something to do with it.
|
| In my family more than half of one side of my immediate parent-
| generation family members have been diagnosed with the disease.
| Most of them get by with little to no drugs.
|
| All of them were diagnosed in connection with divorce
| proceedings.
|
| (We had a misunderstanding. You must be hearing voices.)
|
| I could not help but believe, admittedly biased, that this is
| "health" as a locus of power, blame, and control.
|
| In higher education I had close blind friends who achieved high
| marks and went on to work in Fortune 500 companies, at a level
| not unlike people I knew before they got hit with a diagnosis.
| Did they have disagreements with loved ones? Sure. If they had
| found themselves in a bitter marriage and divorce, would
| something they said be weaponized into a diagnosis of mental
| illness? Maybe. At the rate of the general population? Maybe. I
| don't know.
|
| I am not criticizing, accosting, or accusing anybody of anything.
| Just asking some questions.
| rezgi wrote:
| Isn't it that when you combine two extremely low prevalence
| phenomenons together, you can't really make any accurate
| predictions because the numbers are so low that the error margin
| is too high? I might be wrong, but I seem to remember something
| to that effect. Could it be what's at play here?
| K0SM0S wrote:
| The thing is, if you had a discrepancy of some order of
| magnitude (e.g. 6,000 or 60 instead of 600), you could talk
| about accuracy problems. You could look into rounding errors
| and margins of errors, like we do with constants in physics,
| and that would maybe yield some new or modified equations
| (models).
|
| But the "binary" _absence_ of even 1 single case hints at
| something else: it 's a category thing, there's "in it" or "out
| of it", and it seems that being born blind somehow means you
| can't develop schizophrenia.
| contravariant wrote:
| The absence of any cases is strong evidence against the null
| hypothesis that the both are independent (assuming the
| combination isn't just much harder to diagnose), but it _isn
| 't_ strong evidence for it being impossible. Just because
| something hasn't happened doesn't allow you to distinguish
| between it being impossible and it being very unlikely (of
| course the other way around does work, then this is strong
| evidence that it is possible).
| K0SM0S wrote:
| I will yield to your logic, and thanks for taking the time
| to explain how my approximation was flawed. I really need
| to brush up my logic skills... I did say "hint" though,
| which really means it is hypothesis, not strict logic at
| that point.
|
| Edit: wait, no, I re-read my post and clearly, I did not
| make the logical fallacy. You're correct, and I did see
| that, hence using the word "hints at", not "means that".
| But my wording was bad afterwards ("is" instead of "would
| be"). : ) so thanks for clarifying.
| gowld wrote:
| Or it shows underdiagnois or hard to find almost-never events
| K0SM0S wrote:
| Eh indeed, and it could even be that schizophrenia
| (whatever its "base principle" is in the brain) exists in
| some people born blind, but presents itself in such a
| different way that it's misdiagnosed for something else (so
| categorically, that we already have another name for it).
|
| But I think it's really worth investigating. Could yield
| important knowledge and may lead to new forms of treatment
| perhaps.
| growlist wrote:
| From my admittedly completely uninformed position, this looks so
| much like academics searching for some profound insight that will
| win a Nobel prize (or perhaps just guarantee a tasty stream of
| research grants) when in reality the truth could be much simpler.
| Let's look at an example of a group that suffers
| disproportionately:
|
| 'The high level of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in
| the UK probably reflects the interaction of multiple risk
| factors, many of which cluster in the black Caribbean community
| in the UK. Particularly significant factors appear to be the
| combination of isolation and exclusion, both within society
| (living in areas of low ethnic density and reduced participation
| in society) and within the family (family break-up and paternal
| separation). These factors seem to be more powerful than
| socioeconomic disadvantage, which is more likely to be a
| consequence than causal. Racism itself may contribute to social
| exclusion, increasing the vulnerability to schizophrenia.
| Biological or genetic susceptibility do not appear to explain
| high rates of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans. More research is
| needed about the role of cannabis, particularly in its more
| potent forms, and whether this contributes to the excess of
| schizophrenia in black Caribbeans.'
|
| Perhaps it's as simple as: people that are born blind are to some
| extent insulated from risk factors that are conducive of
| schizophrenia.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/ (just the
| first article I could pull up on a phenomenon I was aware of)
| darawk wrote:
| That would be a reasonable explanation I think if the rates of
| schizophrenia were merely lower amongst the blind. But what's
| said here is something quite ab it stronger than that: there
| are _zero_ known cases of schizophrenia among the congenitally
| blind. If true, and if not simply a sampling artifact, it
| implies something pretty profound about the nature of
| schizophrenia as a disorder that has hitherto not been known.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| With regards to being skeptical of scientists and their
| motivations, I m as myopic as they come, but even to me this is
| a stretch. This is a legitimately interesting observation,
| something that does make sense given how big a role our visual
| cortex plays in the brain. You're right that there are risk
| factors but they just increase and decrease frequencies. If a
| factor eliminated this condition, there's definitely need to
| investigate that further to understand why.
| nothis wrote:
| >Perhaps it's as simple as: people that are born blind are to
| some extent insulated from risk factors that are conducive of
| schizophrenia.
|
| Isn't that as interesting, too? I admit, I thought it was the
| takeaway of the article.
| williesleg wrote:
| No person born without a brain voted for Trump.
| drcode wrote:
| I think the vast majority of schizophrenics have relatively mild
| symptoms (just as most diseases have more sufferers of a mild
| version vs. more severe version) and their diagnosis is made
| primarily because they have a disease that makes it hard for them
| to be 100% self sufficient, and there needs to be a paper trail
| in place that documents this.
|
| Although the majority of blind people have essentially 100% self
| sufficiency (maybe with some occasional help from family/friends
| on some edge cases) I suspect it is relatively easy for a
| congenitally blind person to get financial and other assistance
| in the US, since as a society we are fairly supportive of people
| with obvious congenital disabilities. I could therefore imagine
| that if there was mild schizophrenia in a congenitally blind
| person, there'd be far less incentive for the affected person or
| their family to establish a formal diagnosis to this effect.
|
| I wonder if this could be a partial explanation for this
| surprising statistic (and the lack of evidence for severe
| schizophrenia could maybe just be due to inadequate sample sizes
| in the OP study to detect this smaller set of people.)
| cassowary37 wrote:
| Just queried my health system database and this statement as it
| pertains to congenital cortical blindness is factually incorrect.
| eyeundersand wrote:
| Well, do explain! You can't just say something is incorrect and
| not elaborate.
| mantap wrote:
| It seems intuitive to me that visual centers of the brain don't
| develop properly in the absence of visual stimulation. Has
| anybody done fMRIs to compare congenitally blind people with
| those who became blind later in life? Also it begs the question:
| which blind person with schizophrenia became blind at the
| youngest age?
| azeirah wrote:
| Schizophrenia is not limited to visual hallucinations though,
| interesting ;o
| [deleted]
| 1_over_n wrote:
| it would be interesting to know if anyone has compared
| activity in visual cortex in schizophrenics having auditory
| vs visual vs olfactory vs tactile hallucinations to controls.
|
| A quick search shows "hyperconnectivity" has been found
| betwen the amygdala and visual cortex in those with visual
| hallucinations.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4266287/
| bluGill wrote:
| There have been instances of blind from birth people creating
| great drawings. Their visual center must be working somehow to
| imagine and draw things they can't see.
| garmaine wrote:
| Or they develop entirely different mechanism? I don't see why
| the visual center of the brain has to be involved at all.
| qnsi wrote:
| Because its innate
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Or that part of the brain is adapted for other uses. We
| cannot imagine what it's like to be congenitally blind...
| the world would be extremely different.
| qnsi wrote:
| You can read Blank Slate by Steven Pinker where he talks
| about this. We can do neuroimaging and try to guess what
| happens
| garmaine wrote:
| No, a big clump of neurons in that area is innate. When
| hooked up to functioning eyes, what we call the "visual
| cortex" develops in the vast majority of sighted people.
| If it were truly innate, babies would be born with fully
| functioning visual processing centers, which they are
| not.
|
| There is also every reason to suspect this doesn't happen
| in congenitally blind individuals, where the visual
| feedback loop is not available during neural development.
| 0xcafecafe wrote:
| Interesting. Can it also have something to do with an extremely
| small sample size? These are both rare conditions so intersection
| might be even rarer.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Commenter above addresses this. Considering the prevalence of
| each condition, if they were independent then we would expect
| that 2 out of 10,000 people should have both together. The fact
| that zero cases have been found suggests that there is either a
| diagnosis issue, or that the two conditions are not
| independent.
| klodolph wrote:
| That was an arithmetic error. It's 2 out of 1,000,000.
| archi42 wrote:
| The total 620 is actually correct again: 0.0072 times
| 0.0003 times 311591917 is 673.04. I suppose the 53 person
| discrepancy is due to rounding towards 0.03% but using a
| more accurate number for the actual computation (e.g.
| 0.0277%).
| dotancohen wrote:
| 620 blind schizophrenics should be enough for anyone.
| klodolph wrote:
| You can't just throw extra digits around like that. It's
| a bit unusual and jarring to see the population of the US
| quoted as "311591917" even if that is the census figure,
| because such a high-precision number would only be true
| for about a minute and you don't know _which minute._
| archi42 wrote:
| Chill please. I used the exact number from the paper as
| quoted somewhere else in this discussion. Which seems
| adequate when saying that the authors final number
| (sixhundredsomething) is most likely correct even if the
| intermediate value "0.02%" is obviously wrong (and
| probably just a mistake in the print).
|
| If you have questions as to which point in time this
| number refers to, I kindly refer you to the original
| paper and/or the authors.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That sounds far more reasonable. Still, that leaves
| hundreds of cases that either are not being diagnosed or
| simply fail to exist.
| aj-4 wrote:
| Not sure if this will get buried, but I have an anecdote to
| support the visual link, which may also help anyone dealing with
| psychic issues.
|
| I was 23, living abroad, feeling totally isolated.
|
| One day, I smoked weed which led to an "episode" I guess you
| could say -- quite literally I was hallucinating that I was in a
| hospital, while i was in my room.
|
| What happened next was weird. I felt extremely depersonalized for
| weeks and months after, concurrently I developed a swirling blind
| spot in my right eye.
|
| A distortion, so to speak.
|
| I saw neurologists and was diagnosed as having an "ocular
| migraine" however I never had a headache so this didn't add up.
|
| Looking back, I believe I was on the brink of becoming
| schizophrenic - and would have unless what happened next did.
|
| So this next part is slightly controversial -- but hear me out
|
| Through the several months that would follow I would discover and
| get obsessed with "RSD" -- a controversial company that teaches
| guys how to pick up girls.
|
| On the surface, it sounds crass and not politically correct, but
| if you watch their videos "get you in the door" with "game", and
| teach you topics of incredible value, like "growth mindset", "the
| power of now" / meditation and believing in abundance.
|
| Now WTF does this have to do with the topic at hand?
|
| Well, being receptive to these new ideas and absorbing them
| completely changed my world view.
|
| I grew up in an extremely liberal household, and did feel any
| agency to affect the world around me. Fixed mind set.
|
| What these guys gave me was empowerment, agency, a more
| conservative mindset under which the world "made sense" - there
| was now a framework for reality, rather than chaos.
|
| Subsequently, I was able to learn programming from scratch, start
| a business, go on to make 6 figures less than a year later.
|
| Somewhere along the line the distortion and negative feeling were
| entirely replaced. I couldn't tell you when.
|
| tl;dr: I was close to schizophrenia which manifested itself in
| visual symptoms, overcame with a mindset change
| aiCeivi9 wrote:
| Does aphantasia have any impact?
| Jugglerofworlds wrote:
| I have aphantasia and schizophrenia. I've never had a visual or
| auditory hallucination, but I have had plenty of delusions and
| cognitive dysfunction. Ever since learning about aphantasia
| I've wondered if it has protected me from these types of
| hallucinations. Maybe someone should run a study on this?
|
| A common post among the people over at /r/schizophrenia is that
| the so called negative symptoms of schizophrenia (anhedonia,
| apathy, reduced social drive, cognitive impairment, etc) are
| just as bad if not worse than the positive symptoms
| (hallucinations and delusions). Unfortunately the negative
| symptoms are not adequately treated by any medicine and are in
| fact made worse (!) by medication. This is probably the number
| one reason why schizophrenics quit their medication - the
| medications are simply so shitty that people would rather risk
| the positive symptoms than experience worse negative symptoms.
|
| There's no good research directions for new schizophrenia
| medications either. Schizophrenia research certainly isn't
| discussed (or have funds raised for it) as much as Alzheimer's
| research despite the fact that 3.5 million people in the US
| have it, and it affects people at a much younger age.
|
| Edit: Before starting medication I noticed some visual
| disturbances related to schizophrenia often known as sensory
| gating deficits. I would get an overload of visual sensory
| information to the point where I would notice nearly every
| detail in my visual range simultaneously (that's the best way I
| can explain it). At times it was actually quite beautiful since
| the whole world would pop out in vivid color. However as soon
| as motion was introduced it quickly became overwhelming.
| throwa20200212 wrote:
| I have aphantasia and auditory hallucinations.
| mbreedlove wrote:
| That would mean that you sometimes hear things in your
| head, but you have no control over what you hear?
| himlion wrote:
| That's an interesting thought. I (think I) have aphantasia and
| I could easily see how you'd be less inclined to
| hallucinations, intrusive thoughts and the like.
| Filligree wrote:
| If you think you have aphantasia, you almost certainly do. I
| was in the same boat, but after conversations with a few
| friends I found that the ones which don't give _very literal_
| descriptions of their imaginations.
|
| It isn't in any way an analogy, they literally do see the
| things they're imagining. It's like a hallucination, except
| with control and full awareness that it's not real.
|
| It's easy to see how that could turn into actual
| hallucinations, I'll agree.
| admiral33 wrote:
| I do not have aphantasia. The way I think of my imagination
| is like a virtual machine running a separate reality I'm in
| control of. I can roll a ball around on a plane in space
| and still have awareness of "base" reality.
|
| Other -non visual- sensations I am able to simulate: -
| Taste/smell, able to taste specific foods without eating
| them - Sound, able to hear conversations, music, etc. -
| Pain, able to feel the sensation of touching a hot stove or
| breaking my arm
|
| If any people with aphantasia are in this thread, are you
| able to "simulate" any of these experiences? Also: are you
| religious in any way? There is an interesting history of
| religion and schizophrenia [0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_schizophrenia
| garmaine wrote:
| > If any people with aphantasia are in this thread, are
| you able to "simulate" any of these experiences?
|
| No. Memories are like non-verbal propositional knowledge.
| You know what happened, you can articulate connected
| facts about it. But the idea of "hallucinating" a visual
| memory is absolutely foreign to me. You bunch of crazy
| people actually see things that aren't there, in your
| mind's eye?
|
| > Also: are you religious in any way?
|
| Strong no, but I fail to see the relevance. I'm atheist
| for entirely unrelated reasons.
| rckoepke wrote:
| > You bunch of crazy people actually see things that
| aren't there, in your mind's eye?
|
| It's not so much that I "see" them -- it's very distinct
| from the visual perception. For me, actual sight is
| associated with some physical feelings - not only do I
| see objects/colors/etc but there's some degree of
| feedback from the muscles of my eye, best demonstrated by
| looking at bright lights vs dim surfaces. It's very, very
| clear when I'm actually seeing something.
|
| Then, separately from ocular perception, there's an
| ethereal space inside my head where I can conjure up
| various "platonic ideals" of things, and the senses they
| generate. It's like a sandbox of sorts, or perhaps that
| loading scene in the matrix where Neo and Trinity grab a
| bunch of guns.
|
| By platonic ideal, i mean that when I think "Apple", I
| sort of see an apple in that internal space, but it's
| neither red, nor green - unless I focus on "red apples"
| in which case it will no longer be green, but also won't
| yet be specifically a Fuji apple or a Red Delicious
| apple. It's just an uninstantiated class of "apple.red"
| existing in my headspace.
|
| No matter how hard I visualize the apple, no matter how
| many specifics I give it (Fuji apple, small soft brown
| spot on one side, with broad color splotches rather than
| narrow bands)...it never activates the "feeling" of real
| sight. It very much feels like it doesn't exist, a
| temporary cloud of vapor that just "poofs" away instantly
| if it's not constantly regenerated.
|
| For me, there's very little way I could see getting
| confused between my visual imaginations and my visual
| sight.
|
| Generally when I conjure something up I don't just see it
| visually, potentially I also sort of taste or smell or
| can recognize the feel of its texture, and maybe hear
| associated sounds like the breaking open sound of the
| apple. Again, all of these are extremely non-tangible and
| generally would never be confused with real sensations.
| They occupy a different space.
|
| It's like a simulation and modeling environment with a
| physics engine, more than anything else. It's a place to
| run experiments - with or without hypotheses.
|
| Also, almost all my thoughts have a verbal monologue.
| There aren't "characters" in my head talking to me, it's
| usually my own voice, but sometimes I can use other
| people's voices to sound things out as well. Rather
| different from my internal monologue I can also pull up
| "recordings" of what other people said to me (which are
| really generative models, akin to a decoder in machine
| learning).
| mnowicki wrote:
| That was the best explanation I've heard about this,
| before reading this I was questioning if I had aphantasia
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| I'm not able to do any of these.
| LukeBMM wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that, in the Extreme
| Imagination Conference 2019 keynote, Prof. Zeman
| described "about half" of over 2000 folks his team has
| studied as multimodal. So for roughly 50%, it's purely a
| matter of visual processing and doesn't apply to other
| senses (like your examples), while the other half include
| multiple (or all) senses.
|
| That being said, I'm one of the folks who have to choose
| how to add spices when I cook based upon what I remember
| working together in the past. As I understand it, some
| (perhaps only a talented few and perhaps including some
| unimodal aphants) are able to use the same part of their
| brain that processes taste and smell to imagine the taste
| and smell of new combinations of flavors.
|
| Another quirk: I don't think I get songs stuck in my head
| in the same way as others. I may have a particular verse
| or rhythm on my mind... but I'm pretty sure that I'm
| lucking out in this regard.
|
| In all the cases mentioned, I'm reasonably capable of
| predicting or extrapolating outcomes based upon past
| experiences (I don't stick my hand on many hot stoves,
| for example). But my brain just doesn't seem to run
| through the process of recreating sensations to get
| there.
| missingrib wrote:
| That's interesting. I think I have aphantasia (the way
| people describe their visualizations seems very
| strange/foreign to me although sometimes I think I can
| visualize some things) but I can hear music very well in
| my head. The other sensations I cannot imagine at all.
|
| Particularly, the idea of imagining pain and feeling it
| is strange to me.
| Filligree wrote:
| Well, I'm one so...
|
| No, I'm not able to simulate any of that, in the way I
| think you mean. I can predict the outcomes, but I can't
| at all claim to be experiencing any of it. It involves no
| more sensation than reading words on a page.
|
| (Which is to say, none. I understand that that can also
| vary. The only time that changes is when I'm dreaming. So
| I know what experience I'm not getting, I suppose.)
|
| No, I'm not religious, but nobody in my family is. We
| used to be subjects of the Thunderer; that was a couple
| of generations back. Christianity managed to break us of
| that, but not to make us believe them.
| newnumbawhodis wrote:
| I had aphantasia until I had a drug (weed and shrooms)
| induced psychosis. During the psychosis I had constant
| musical hallucinations. Now, after recovering, I can now
| both visualize and have a clear inner monologue in my mind.
| garmaine wrote:
| I wish that was a repeatable experience.
| psychonautLorax wrote:
| This is fascinating. I also have aphantasia and
| experienced psychosis with high dosages of those drugs,
| however the only lasting effect I received was a profound
| connection with all living things. I subsequently became
| vegetarian. Other lasting effects I have experienced from
| strong psychedelics are mostly social realizations--
| basically I have more/expanded empathy and imagination
| and am able to go far enough outside my own headspace to
| recognize how I differ from others. I envy people who
| claim that psychedelics have made them closer to
| cognitive normal; while they have made me happier in the
| sense that I have less internal conflict, they have never
| "fixed" my brain, only given me better coping mechanisms.
| ken wrote:
| > If you think you have aphantasia, you almost certainly
| do.
|
| I took the VVIQ online and it concluded that I "probably
| don't" have aphantasia (but merely "You do not have a vivid
| imagination"). Basically it seems that unless you're 0's
| across the board, you can form some part of some image in
| your mind, and thus don't meet their definition.
|
| Then again, the only one I rated above a 1 was "gait", and
| that's as much auditory as visual, so I'm not sure I
| believe them.
|
| I took another online test which asked me to look at a 3D
| shape made of blocks, and then later compare others (drawn
| from different angles) and determine which was the same,
| without referencing the original. It was an easy test, but
| to me it had little to do with visual imagery. I just
| remembered the original shape as sounds (far easier than
| remembering a shape!), and then picked which of the others
| sounded the same.
|
| That's the fundamental problem I see with tests that try to
| figure out how a person thinks. You try to invent a test
| which you believe can only possibly be solved in one way --
| but people who don't think that way already have a lifetime
| of experience living and thinking, so surely they've
| developed other mechanisms by now.
|
| It's like saying "I know how to test if someone has two
| legs: we'll put the finish line 100 meters over there! Then
| anyone missing a leg won't be able to get to it." Just
| because you don't have two legs doesn't mean you can't get
| around just fine.
|
| I'm absolutely sure there are people who solved the block
| problem visually, and tactilely, and other ways I can't
| even guess at. I think "aphantasia" is all wrong. It
| implies visual thinking is normal, and "non-visual" is the
| only alternative. We don't have a special word for "people
| who _don 't_ have blue eyes". We say directly what color we
| mean.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| I don't think schizophrenia has any dependence on visual input at
| all. This is just a probability problem, since the combined
| probability of both occurring is very small, as the separate
| probabilities are already small; Anyone that has a brain can have
| the disease, blind or not; The disease itself is very little
| understood. For example, when I was a child I had visions and
| heard voices. I would go to sleep and then, in the middle of the
| night I would wake up and start seeing things around me, hundreds
| of voices talking, light beings, etc. Some would call me a
| schizophrenic, some a medium. I could be both, could be neither;
| kazagistar wrote:
| What's the chance that any two low probability unrelated
| conditions happen to have an empty overlap at random?
| banads wrote:
| Marshall Mcluhan hypothesized that schizophrenia may be a
| consequence of literacy
| djsumdog wrote:
| Blind people can read though. Many who are born blind learn to
| read and type Braille. So it would have to be specifically
| about visual literacy?
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| I would like to hear more about that, about other mental
| illnesses, depression etc... Does being blind also affect these?
| macintux wrote:
| The article discusses that.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Congenital blind people have much higher rates of autism.
|
| Some models of psychiatric illness view schizophrenia and
| autism as two broadly opposite poles of a grand spectrum, so
| this kind of makes sense in the context.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Do you have any further resources for this view? I'm very
| interested.
|
| I have an uncle with severe schizophrenia, and a cousin with
| autism, and just recently noted in my journal how autism and
| schizophrenia seem to be the extremes of one's ability to
| reason about and categorize the world around them.
| Retric wrote:
| If you're wondering about how common this should be:
|
| _if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population
| (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an
| estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s
| (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a
| person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would
| be 0.02% or 2 out of every 10,000. Although this is a low
| prevalence rate, it is higher than the rates for childhood-onset
| schizophrenia (Remschmidt and Theisen, 2005), and many other
| well-known medical conditions (e.g., Hodgkin 's lymphoma, Prader
| Willi syndrome, Rett's Syndome). Based on this estimated
| prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of
| 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there
| should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with
| schizophrenia._
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/
|
| That does do rule out misdiagnosis etc, but it does seem to
| support a correlation.
| ocfnash wrote:
| Just a moment, 0.72% x 0.03% = 0.0002%, which is about 2 out
| every 1,000,000.
| anordin95 wrote:
| To be fair, it appears they fixed the math later, or at least
| roughly. (2 out of every 1M) x (the US population) [they cite
| ~311M]. That gives 622. Not far off the 620 they report in
| your quote.
| petrogradphilos wrote:
| This is like having a weighted coin that comes up heads
| with probability 2[?]10-6, flipping it 311 million times,
| and seeing 0 heads. That's astronomically unlikely.
|
| To see this, observe that the number of heads follows a
| binomial distribution with _n_ = 311 million and _p_ =
| 2[?]10-6. This can be well approximated1 by a normal
| distribution with mean _m_ = _np_ = 622 and standard
| deviation _s_ = Sqrt[ _np_ (1 - _p_ )] = 25.
|
| 99.7% of the time2, when you sample from this distribution,
| the sampled value will be within 3 standard deviations of
| the mean, i.e., between _m_ - 3 _s_ = 547 and _m_ + 3 _s_ =
| 697. Results further from the mean are more unlikely. For
| example, seeing a value more than 7 standard deviations
| from the mean (i.e., less than 447 or more than 797) is
| about a 1 in 2 trillion event3. Since 0 is about 25
| standard deviations from the mean, the probability of
| seeing 0 heads is on the order of 10-138.
|
| [1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2021801/condit
| ions-...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68-95-99.7_rule
|
| [3] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/table-of-normal-tail-
| probabil...
| [deleted]
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| That's only true if you test all 311 mio for both. While
| I think that blindness is self-analyzing, that's not true
| for schizophrenia.
|
| So how many blind people were evaluated for
| schizophrenia?
|
| This might actually be a lower percentage than for
| normal-seeing persons. People are less experienced with
| the behavior of blind people, so it's harder for
| surrounding people (and probable even for the blind
| themselves) to recognize it and push people to go get
| diagnosed.
| TimonKnigge wrote:
| Your 'approximation' is doing a lot of the work here..
| Since you have a binomial distribution why not just use
| it directly?
|
| (1 - 2e-6)^(3e6) [?] 0.002
|
| So about 0.2%. Still highly unlikely but orders of
| magnitude more likely than what your normal distribution-
| detour gave.
| petrogradphilos wrote:
| > (1 - 2e-6)^(3e6) [?] 0.002
|
| Using the binomial directly is a good way to get the
| probability of 0 heads. Note, though, that the U.S.
| population is in the neighborhood of 300 million, not 3
| million (as you seem to have used).
|
| (1 - 2[?]10-6)^(3[?]108) [?] 10-261
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+2+*+10%5E-6%
| 29%...
| throwawayhhakdl wrote:
| Except we don't have perfect information. Schizophrenia
| is misdiagnosed fairly frequently. I couldn't find stats
| on undiagnosed schizophrenia, or schizophrenia diagnosed
| without visual hallucinations (which is probably the more
| relevant metric)
| drc500free wrote:
| Another way to get there is that, given N shots at a 1/N
| event, you expect 0 hits 36% of the time (1/e).
|
| You can divide the population up into into 600 groups
| with 500000 people in them, and each of those has a 36%
| chance of not ever hitting.
|
| So seeing no cases is like flipping a 36% coin 600 times
| and hitting 600 times.
| petrogradphilos wrote:
| > Since 0 is about 25 standard deviations from the mean,
| the probability of seeing 0 heads is on the order of
| 10-138.
|
| Note: the above figure comes from the normal
| approximation to the binomial, which loses accuracy
| towards the tails. The exact probability of seeing 0
| heads is (1 - _p_ )^ _n_ = (1 - 2[?]10-6)^(311[?]106) [?]
| 10-270 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+2+*+10%5
| E-6%29%...
| paulmd wrote:
| > This is like having a weighted coin
|
| Tangent: there is no such thing. You can weight a die,
| you cannot weight a coin.
|
| Intuitively this should make sense because even if you
| made one side of the coin from lead and the other from
| balsa wood, all you are doing is changing the center of
| gravity of the coin. The coin spins about its center of
| gravity, not the geometric center of the coin, so this
| makes no difference.
|
| https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~nolan/Papers/dice.pdf
| Retric wrote:
| That paper redefined what it meant to toss a coin making
| their concussion meaningless in practice. For a more in
| dept real world analysis.
|
| http://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf
|
| PS: Of note they where detecting bias in the range of 1%
| that's difficult to detect by hand.
| GuiA wrote:
| I wonder if you could build a (admittedly thick) coin
| with some sensing/actuation going on in order to make it
| land on an arbitrary side.
| dboreham wrote:
| >Tangent: there is no such thing. You can weight a die,
| you cannot weight a coin.
|
| Yes but you don't need such a coin. You can use a perfect
| coin and consider flipping it many times.
|
| Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo9Esp1yaC8
| catblast wrote:
| That paper is not good support for your pedantic
| argument. (More pedantically, any coin without uniform
| density is "weighted" by definition, regardless of toss
| bias)
|
| In fact, most methods of coin toss will be influenced by
| an unbalanced coin in some way. The paper only
| demonstrates that if you flip a coin with a certain
| precisely specified method (and catch it midair) - can
| you be reasonably assured a weighted coin will be
| unbiased.
|
| See their own referenced book Jaynes, 1996 pp 1003-1007,
| which I think gives a much clearer explanation of the
| possibilities.
|
| Note that the NFL for instance does not catch the coin,
| so there's at least a real world where a coin could be
| biased.
|
| The important part of that paper is this:
|
| "Examples of how others have flipped and tossed coins
| show the students how essential it is to carefully
| describe the experimental process." not just the one
| detail about angular momentum and CoG.
| [deleted]
| Supermancho wrote:
| A magnetic coin, might be the "trick coin" that was being
| posited.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It could be made to make a difference _in air_. Imagine a
| styrofoam coin with one side padded with an extra layer
| of lead.
|
| (For best results, make the styrofoam thick relatively to
| the lead, and/or attach extra aerodynamic surfaces :).)
| [deleted]
| klarstrup wrote:
| There are examples in that paper of scenarios of
| effectively influenced coin tosses...
| rtkwe wrote:
| I feel like it's not super difficult if you're catching
| the coin, if you're able to position the coin in the same
| place and apply the same force consistently you'll
| largely get the same height and speed of rotation. When I
| was a bored kid I was able to get a pretty consistent
| coin toss where it would land on the opposite of the side
| at the beginning. [0]
|
| [0] Of course I didn't do any statistical analysis or a
| huge number of trials for this to really tell if I was
| able to do it but it felt pretty consistent.
| kgwgk wrote:
| The same is true for a die :-) It could make a difference
| for the coin if you "rolled" it instead of catching it in
| the air.
| munk-a wrote:
| Possibly, though if we want to be pedantic "weighting"
| has shifted from merely meaning "increased in weight" to
| meaning "biased through manipulation" - colloquially you
| can describe a situation as "weighted against someone" if
| you think that person may be unfairly disadvantaged -
| like in a multi-talent contest a continued draw of
| activities that favor one party using a hidden method
| that is suspected to be directed to the end of favoring
| that party.
|
| You absolutely can manufacture unfair coins either using
| a two surfaced approach (like a weak magnetic field
| acting on a magnetized coin) but even a one surfaced
| approach is possible if you make use of carvings on the
| surface of the coin to get a favorable result from air
| resistence - lastly you can even achieve it through
| density, if one side of a coin is significantly more
| dense then the other then it will tend to land face down
| - you can play with this a bit by trying to flip a
| weighted cylinder and observing the landing pattern - I
| might suggest taking a coin roll (like you get in a bank)
| and gluing some coins into one end of it - then try and
| flip it in the air so it lands coin-side up.
|
| It is, however, very hard to bias a coin significantly
| without skewing the dimensions or having clear
| alterations visible on the coin.
| thedirt0115 wrote:
| The parent comment that a coin of lead and balsa wouldn't
| be biased, but to clarify, the linked research paper
| states it can't be biased unless allowed to bounce/spin.
| Maybe your weighted cylinder flipping is not biased if
| you throw+grab instead of letting it land?
| jackpirate wrote:
| To add to your point: I ran some experiments a while back
| with curved coins. The coins have to be absurdly shaped
| before the shape affects the outcomes:
|
| https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-
| pro...
| paulmd wrote:
| > Possibly, though if we want to be pedantic "weighting"
| has shifted from merely meaning "increased in weight" to
| meaning "biased through manipulation"
|
| Not sure what your point is here. Yes, that is the
| meaning that is being discussed. You understood it
| yourself. Grandparent understood it as well. What value
| do you feel bringing up this point brings to the debate?
|
| > like a weak magnetic field acting on a magnetized coin
|
| Probably not. The field will act through the other face
| of the coin as well. The coin is pulled towards the
| magnetic surface, but it doesn't alter the revolution of
| the coin. If the field is sufficiently weak to not pass
| through the coin then it wouldn't have any impact on the
| other side either.
|
| The exception would possibly be mu metal or something
| else that prevents the magentic field from acting on one
| face entirely, in combination with a strong magnetic
| field, and I'm still going to lean towards "probably
| wouldn't work". It would still intermittently pull the
| entire coin towards the surface, it's not clear that it
| would counter the rotation of the coin itself.
|
| > even a one surfaced approach is possible if you make
| use of carvings on the surface of the coin to get a
| favorable result from air resistence
|
| No, because air resistance is acting on both sides of the
| coin at once. The air resistance is a constant A+B, not
| A,B,A,B.
|
| > lastly you can even achieve it through density
|
| No, this is the entire point of the article. The coin
| doesn't revolve around its geometric center, it revolves
| around its center of gravity. By changing the density of
| one side (balsa wood and lead, as I said) you change the
| center of gravity but the coin itself has the same rate
| of revolution.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| So even then, 600 people in the US should be both born blind
| and scizophrenic
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That isn't a guarantee that 600 people will be born with
| both.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Obviously there's no guarantee, and there's also the fact
| that we may not have every case documented, but if it is
| true that we have 0 case documented, that's pretty far
| from 600. Even if it's not "impossible", then at the very
| least it's less likely.
| luc4sdreyer wrote:
| It's a simple binomial probability calculation. The
| probability of one or more blind schizophrenic people
| born in the US, assuming they're independent variables,
| is 1-0,999998^330000000. I don't have a calculator on
| hand that can calculate that, but it's more than 1 -
| 10^-87. So the odds that there is no link between the two
| is close to the odds of guessing a specific bitcoin
| wallet's key in one try.
| primo4444 wrote:
| No, the .02 is correct. If you ignore the percentages part
| (since both left and right side use it), you're doing
| 0.72 x 0.03, which is indeed 0.02
|
| If you do it as probabilities not expressed as percentages,
| it's 0.0072 x 0.0003, which is 0.0002, but that's 0.02%
| rlpb wrote:
| You can't just ignore the percentage signs.
|
| 0.72% expressed as a decimal is 0.0072. 0.03% expressed as
| a decimal is 0.0003. 0.0072 x 0.0003 = 0.000002. Expressed
| back as a percentage, that's 0.0002%.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _it 's 0.0072 x 0.0003, which is 0.0002, but that's
| 0.02%_
|
| No. 0.0072 x 0.0003 = 0.00000216 ~= 0.000002 = 0.0002%
| primo4444 wrote:
| You're right. Not sure how I fell into that trap so
| easily.
| prestonh wrote:
| It's because we usually dont multiply percentages, but
| instead work with normal decimal figures.
| injb wrote:
| I wonder if it's better to treat percentage as a unit or
| variable. So a-percent x b-percent = c(percent-squared),
| or c divided by 100 twice.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| You could also replace % with 10-2 and use scientific
| notation: 0.72% [?] 0.03% =
| 0.72 [?] 10-2 [?] 0.03 [?] 10-2 = 7.2 [?] 10-3
| [?] 3 [?] 10-4 = 21.6 [?] 10-7 = 2.16 [?]
| 10-6 [?] 2 in 1 million
| petrogradphilos wrote:
| You could also replace % with 10-2 and use scientific
| notation: 0.72% [?] 0.03% =
| 0.72 [?] 10-2 [?] 0.03 [?] 10-2 = 7.2 [?] 10-3
| [?] 3 [?] 10-4 = 7.2 [?] 3 [?] 10-3 [?] 10-4
| = 21.6 [?] 10-7 = 2.16 [?] 10-6 [?] 2 in
| 1 million
| [deleted]
| harryh wrote:
| Wowsers! That's quite the elementary math mistake in a
| journal article. I'm tempted to track down the authors and
| point this out to them.
| Forgivenessizer wrote:
| journalists really are a bit dumber than the average guy.
| dooglius wrote:
| Or the journal editor, you definitely should. This is the
| kind of thing that can easily get cited in future work on
| the matter.
| harryh wrote:
| I sent an email to editorial.office@frontiersin.org. If
| they reply, I will post their response here.
|
| Subject: elementary math error in journal article
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/ was
| linked to and discussed today from Hacker News (a popular
| discussion board for software engineers) here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307445.
|
| In the ensuing discussion a poster noticed that the
| journal article contains an elementary math error:
|
| "if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the
| population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital
| blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people
| born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al.,
| 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both
| conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.02% or
| 2 out of every 10,000."
|
| 0.72% * 0.03% is actually .0002% or 2 out of every
| 1,000,000.
|
| Despite the article being several years old, I thought
| you might want to know.
|
| -harryh
| ocfnash wrote:
| Great job; we need more good citizens like you!
|
| I was unaware that they do at least have the implied 620
| figure for the entire US correct, so there is hope that
| this is just a localised typo.
|
| I can't get over how stunningly-similar this is to the
| infamous Verizonmath!
| eyeundersand wrote:
| Thank you for your effort. For someone who is in academia
| and a firm believer in the advancement of knowledge via
| peer-review, these things matter. Cheers!
| glofish wrote:
| it is probably not a math mistake since, when they
| applied the probability the 620 people is correct. Might
| be a typesetting (formatting) mistake. The 0.0002 is
| already a percent, but someone overlooked that and turned
| it again into percent.
|
| Still it should definitely be corrected as the 2 out of
| 10,000 is a value that sticks in the mind.
| mennis16 wrote:
| They also used the 2 in 10,000 figure when picking out
| the comparison syndromes. I believe Retts is ~1 in
| 10,000. It's definitely not 1 in a million.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| I once helped setting an article in tex (originally
| written in word) and made the mistake of not noticing
| that rich text 10^20 got converted to 1020 in plain text.
| We only noticed post print but nobody else seem to have
| stumbled on it even though it was at the core of the
| articles thesis.
| HourglassFR wrote:
| My guess is the editor somehow messed up the per thousand
| sign %00
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_point
|
| edit: My bad. Correct character, incorrect description.
| It is indeed "ten thousand".
| jfk13 wrote:
| Somewhat ironically, I think you're off by one character
| here.
|
| Unicode U+2031 %00 is actually the per ten thousand sign
| (check its character name).
|
| Unicode U+2030 %0 is the per thousand (or "per mille")
| sign.
| airstrike wrote:
| The one thing worse than off-by-one errors are off-by-
| zero errors.
| harryh wrote:
| Weirdly, as ChrisRR points out, they get the total number
| of predicted blind + scizophrenic people in the US
| correct. So it almost looks like more of a typo than a
| math error.
|
| But still.
| carlmr wrote:
| It makes sense, because as a scientist you often only
| write it as e.g. 0.2% for the article, but 0.002 in your
| actual calculation.
|
| Percentage calculations being off by 2 zeros I would say
| is one of the most common mistakes I saw in, e.g.
| statistics exams.
| candiodari wrote:
| I seem to be missing what to anyone who's ever had to deal with
| youth services is the obvious alternative:
|
| Schizophrenia, like almost all diagnosed psychological
| disorders, is called a diagnosis, but is effectively a
| punishment. Psychiatrists feel sorry for blind patients and
| refuse to apply this punishment to them, for the same reason
| they wouldn't punish them for performing a little worse at
| basketball.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| What do you mean it's a punishment?
| soup10 wrote:
| Schizophrenia diagnoses are generally applied to
| individuals with a mix of behavioral problems and "abnormal
| or undesirable" thought patterns. It's a broad brush that
| isn't applied based on hard biological data like an MRI of
| the brain, but on observed and reported behavior at the
| discretion of the psychiatrist and rough adherence to DSM
| guidelines.
|
| Typical treatments like Haldol, Thorazine, and Depakote
| have a blunting and depressive effect on the entire central
| nervous system. Treatments like shock therapy, cause severe
| memory loss and permanent brain damage.
|
| These "treatments" are often paired with coercion,
| involuntary injections, confinement in psych wards, and
| court orders.
|
| Many times LE will bring a civilian to a psych ward as a
| secondary or additional option to charging them with a
| crime. It's often seen as an additional tool in creating
| orderly communities, disciplining individuals that get out
| of line, and overall exerting control on society and free
| thought and action. Once a patient is admitted or
| diagnosed, they are strongly incentivized to align
| themselves and their behaviors to the values and
| expectations of the institutions and people that brought
| them there and control their release and treatment plans.
|
| Even if schizophrenia had a biological signature it
| wouldn't be used in practice because they WANT the
| ambiguity and discretion to classify and medicate patients
| as they see fit.
| kqr wrote:
| I don't know. In most of the civilised world, diagnosis
| unlocks options that were previously not available.
|
| In what part of the world would you rather be sick and
| undiagnosed than have your illness acknowledged?
| rriepe wrote:
| Any place with red flag laws, including the USA. A
| diagnosis can make you a second-class citizen with fewer
| rights.
| JC5413789642675 wrote:
| I doubt many blind people are applying for firearm
| licenses.
| screye wrote:
| With odds like that, they would have to sample a much larger
| population directly for the results to be statistically
| significant.
| dooglius wrote:
| Did you mean "does not rule out misdiagnosis"?
|
| Going further than misdiagnosis, how many congenitally blind
| people are even tested for schizophrenia? Maybe lack of visual
| hallucinations make it less likely someone would get to the
| point of a test at all?
| stef25 wrote:
| Visual hallucinations are not at all the main symptoms of
| schizophrenia. Besides, blind people do "see things" under
| the influence of psychedelics.
| whiddershins wrote:
| That's confusing. Schizophrenia is horribly unpleasant for
| the person who has it, they aren't "tested" so much as they
| are suffering terribly and seek help and are then given a
| diagnosis.
|
| It's not like screening people for spectrum or personality
| disorders.
| wahern wrote:
| > Schizophrenia is horribly unpleasant for the person who
| has it
|
| There's a strong cultural component to how schizophrenia
| manifests. Violent, paranoid thoughts are more common in
| societies like the United States. The extent to which their
| experiences can fit into a positive cultural narrative
| partly dictates their quality of life. The U.S. is
| exceedingly hostile in that regard. You're likely better
| off in a society where hearing voices is considered a gift
| from the gods, or where perceiving odd but intriguing
| cause+effect relationships suggests you can sense magic.
| bluGill wrote:
| I the schizophrenic people I know are afraid of authority
| and avoid anything that might diagnose them. It takes a
| forceful family member to get them to a doctor (or in one
| case the prison system), and constant attention to get them
| to take the treatments. In general if they are not a harm
| to society or themselves it is best to let them live alone
| in a small town (small town because it gives the town
| gossips something useful to talk about: the talk helps
| ensure everybody knows to watch out for the victim, and
| small ensures even new people in town know about the
| situation)
|
| Note, my sample size is far too small to draw universal
| conclusions about schizophrenic.
| vintermann wrote:
| > the schizophrenic people I know are afraid of authority
| and avoid anything that might diagnose them.
|
| Since blind people need to rely on others a lot more than
| people with sight, I think it would be even harder for
| them to avoid medical authorities than for other
| schizophrenics. For what it's worth, the schizophrenics I
| knew personally were not averse to seeking help for their
| condition, but were very distressed by side effects from
| medication (understandably!)
| bildung wrote:
| _> Maybe lack of visual hallucinations make it less likely
| someone would get to the point of a test at all?_
|
| (I am not a psychologist!)
|
| Visual hallucinations are not a hard criterion for diagnosing
| schizophrenia. They do occur, but the symptoms are more about
| delusions, disorganised thinking and catatonic symptoms. IIRC
| hallucinations are more often auditory, like hearing voices.
| dooglius wrote:
| I know, that's not my point, I'm saying the barrier may be
| that a blind schizophrenic person may not even be aware
| that there's anything seriously wrong or worth bringing to
| a doctor's attention, so he would never get to the point of
| a psych evaluation.
| stef25 wrote:
| They would still exhibit bizarre behavior, delusions,
| paranoia, catatonia etc. Patients heavily rely on family
| & friends to help manage their illness. It's very much
| something all-encompassing.
| bildung wrote:
| Then by definition they wouldn't be mentally ill, as
| mental disorders have to cause significant distress for
| the patients to be diagnosed as such.
| dooglius wrote:
| I think you are assuming that significant distress will
| result in awareness that the distress is medically
| significant.
| bildung wrote:
| I have no assumptions about schizophrenia, I just
| paraphrased how the definitions of the ICD-10 work. The
| fact of suffering is the distinction between a mental
| disorder and a quirky personality.
|
| Think of it as a continuous spectrum from the idealized
| normal person (the center of a bell curve) to the person
| having significant problems living a normal, fulfilling
| life. The eccentric personality is somewhere in between.
|
| This is all about definitions. The ICD-10 and similar
| categorizations essentially work by listing a number of
| symptons and a minimum count of symptoms a patient has to
| have to be diagnosed according to this definition. They
| don't make any assumptions about disorders existing per
| se.
| sopooneo wrote:
| By this logic we are speculating that perhaps being blind
| from birth blocks the _symptoms_ of schizophrenia to the
| point that it is no longer a "disease". I don't know if
| this is correct, but a compelling idea.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| Yeah that would be the speculation: that blind
| schizophrenics are asymptomatic.
| jacobush wrote:
| It can be distress which is missed by the doctor.
|
| I think it's far more acceptable for us to "mishear"
| something and think nothing of it. The seeing also have
| the backup sense, _sight_ to verify much of what we hear.
|
| "I heard the sound of an elephant stomping around in my
| living room."
|
| This statement made by a seeing person could be made by
| nobody thinking much of it. I wouldn't immediately ask if
| they actually thought an elephant were in the living room
| at the time.
|
| The same statement made by a (blind) schizophrenic person
| could have implied that the person actually believed
| there _was_ an elephant in the living room, but the
| clinician might have missed the significance and not
| asked follow up questions.
|
| A bit of a contrived example, but you get the gist.
|
| To a seeing person it might
| Ensorceled wrote:
| This theory depends on hundreds, maybe thousands of
| doctors and peditricians, many of whom would be
| specialists focusing on blind patients, a similar number
| of teachers, social workers, care takers, blind training
| centers staff, parents ... ALL missed schizophrenia,
| which is often a debilitating illness, because they are
| "sighted".
| ajuc wrote:
| Being blind since birth likely reduces the probability of being
| diagnosed with schizophrenia if you have it - because you will
| know that everything you "see" is hallucinations so you won't
| act on them.
|
| That changes the math significantly.
| listsfrin wrote:
| > population of 311, 591, 917,
|
| Is this a thing? People write numbers like that?
| zfell wrote:
| Could there be a much simpler explanation?
|
| The most recent study the article sites (Morgan et. al, 2018)
| states that out of 468k people in the population " _1870
| children developed schizophrenia (0.4%) while 9120 developed a
| psychotic illness (1.9%). None of the 66 children with cortical
| blindness developed schizophrenia or psychotic illness._ "
|
| If we don't assume there is a relationship between
| schizophrenia and cortical blindness, it's not surprising that
| none of the 66 people who had cortical blindness developed
| schizophrenia. Simple binomial approximation will yield a 77%
| (0.996^66) probability. Am I missing something?
|
| Also I find the difference in prevalence rates of schizophrenia
| of 0.4% in the Morgan et al. paper vs 0.72% in McGrath et al.
| 2008 odd.
|
| Morgan et al. 2018: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic
| le/abs/pii/S09209...!
| rhacker wrote:
| I wonder if there's no genetic correlation, but rather a brain
| input correlation. There is more brain input from vision than
| any other input possible. Since the brain is mostly a device
| that builds connections based on prior input, a condition like
| schiz may not develop simply because of the type and amount of
| data going in may not be enough to trigger the autistic,
| multiple personalities, and other depression related
| conditions.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _There is more brain input from vision than any other input
| possible_
|
| Is this really true? I would've imagined it to be hearing,
| though tbh I'm unsure how one would begin to approach
| measuring them in isolation.
| sitharus wrote:
| You have, at birth, around 3,500 auditory hair cells per
| ear (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell), so 7000
| inputs to process for sound. Sure your brain does a lot
| with that information to project a 3D sound field from two
| ears, but that's the limit of the input.
|
| The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and 75-150
| million rods (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina).
| There's a bit of crazy data compression that goes in to
| this, but the amount of information to process from the
| eyes is several orders of magnitude greater than from the
| years.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > You have, at birth, around 3,500 auditory hair cells
| per ear (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell), so
| 7000 inputs to process for sound. Sure your brain does a
| lot with that information to project a 3D sound field
| from two ears, but that's the limit of the input.
|
| > The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and
| 75-150 million rods
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina). There's a bit
| of crazy data compression that goes in to this, but the
| amount of information to process from the eyes is several
| orders of magnitude greater than from the years.
|
| While you're technically correct, that's not the whole
| story.
|
| There is a substantial amount of image processing that
| happens in the eye (I suppose it's possible that's true
| of the ear as well; we know much less about hearing than
| sight). I'm not familiar with all the research in the
| area, so I can't throw out numbers, but you can't just
| compare numbers of raw sensors meaningfully.
| wpietri wrote:
| > you can't just compare numbers of raw sensors
| meaningfully.
|
| Why not? It's certainly not definitive, but assuming a
| correlation between number of sensors and dataflow is
| certainly a reasonable starting point. If you really want
| to suggest the number of raw sensors is meaningless with
| regard to data volume, that seems like a much bolder
| claim. Especially when, as here, it's a 4-5 order of
| magnitude difference.
| sitharus wrote:
| I agree, there's so much about the brain we don't
| understand, plus whole sections overlap or process
| multiple sources. Nothing is simple in the brain! In
| terms of the amount of your grain required or dedicated
| to each input this says nothing.
|
| However, the statement was:
|
| > There is more brain input from vision than any other
| input possible
|
| I guess we could compare the nerves that lead from the
| sense organs. Again from wikipedia:
|
| > Each human optic nerve contains between 770,000 and 1.7
| million nerve fibers
|
| > In humans, there are on average 30,000 nerve fibers
| within the cochlear nerve
|
| so again, at least an order of magnitude more nerve
| connections from the sense organs to the brain. I think
| this backs up the original statement.
|
| Interestingly the number of nerve connections from the
| cochlear are greater than the number of raw sensory
| inputs, but the eye is quite the opposite. I know the
| input to the brain is more of a differential coding
| between colours than raw data from the cells.
| jxramos wrote:
| nice technique to focus on the raw transducers/sensory
| cells counts! That's fundamentally the raw inputs we're
| dealing with.
| jxramos wrote:
| you can look at the mass dedicated to each sense I suppose
| and use that as a proxy, occipital lobe vs temporal lobe.
| Couldn't land a search hit on those quickly though.
|
| Just from a signal processing perspective, sound is a 1D
| data type, though we do have stereo sound and can localize
| sounds, so that's some additional processing there I
| suppose. There's also frequencies involved. Image
| processing is typically more demanding than audio from what
| I understand with computational things, images being 2D, or
| 3D sources. This is a pretty interesting exploration
| relative sensory input load.
| sdegutis wrote:
| I wonder if there's a philosophical correlation.
|
| Mental breaks from reality are increasingly common as society
| increasingly condones and encourages escaping reality in many
| ways, including recreational drug use, television and video
| game addictions, and even physical mutilation.
|
| Yet this isn't happening with those who were born with one
| less way to perceive reality. Perhaps it's because those born
| blind have a greater and stronger need to hold fast to
| reality, themselves not being able to benefit from it nearly
| as much as everyone around them and as much as nature would
| have it.
| jdironman wrote:
| Then we should be looking at the occipital lobe, no?
| pelliphant wrote:
| wait... is this math error in the actual article? or just in
| the vice text?
| prostheticvamp wrote:
| Just so we are clear: the approach taken in the studies
| described is "we looked at a bunch of blind people and couldn't
| find a schizophrenic", and "we looked at a bunch of
| schizophrenics and couldn't find a blind person."
|
| The appropriate question is: can such an approach, in a wildly
| fractured series of data sets, overlook 600 people?
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| It sure can, but the odds are against it overlooking all of
| them.
|
| Of course, maybe the genes leading to blindness and
| schizophrenia together also lead to some other defect that
| results in miscarriage or some other kind of early death.
| ajross wrote:
| To be clear: the odds are against it _assuming no
| confounding interference_. And given that, I don 't know
| that an error of 600 is really that much of a statement. I
| mean, just to invent an example (not the only possible one,
| obviously!):
|
| Congenital blindness is likely diagnosed with near 100%
| certainty in early childhood. It's easy to spot. The same
| is very much NOT true of mental health problems.
| Schisophrenics are diagnosed, almost always, when their
| condition manifests in such a way to interfere with their
| life (or someone else's) to the extent that the doctors get
| called in. There are widely assumed to be LOTS of
| undiagnosed mental health cases in society, simply because
| the sufferers live in situations where their disorder can
| be managed (or suppressed!) in an ad hoc way.
|
| Now, the question becomes: are blind people more likely to
| be living in a circumstance where their mental health
| troubles are more easily managed/ignored/suppressed without
| the involvement of doctors who would otherwise diagnose
| schizophrenia? That seems not at all unlikely to me.
|
| And frankly: this kind of confounded measurement strikes me
| as MUCH MORE likely than a heretofore unrecognized link
| between vision and schizophrenia. Significant results
| require significant proof, and I don't think this is it.
| sophacles wrote:
| There are other links between vision and schizophrenia -
| e.g. https://www.wired.com/2009/04/schizoillusion/
| (although that may better be described as a link between
| visual processing and schizophrenia. vision -> visual
| processing is a fairly well accepted link however, so
| vision -> visual processing -> schizophrenia seems
| plausible enough to look at a bit more.)
| wpietri wrote:
| > are blind people more likely to be living in a
| circumstance where their mental health troubles are more
| easily managed/ignored/suppressed without the involvement
| of doctors who would otherwise diagnose schizophrenia?
| That seems not at all unlikely to me.
|
| Could you explain your thinking to me? I'd think that
| people with one serious condition would me much more
| likely to have a second serious condition diagnosed,
| purely because of increased attention from medical
| professionals. That's certainly been my experience.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I 'd think that people with one serious condition
| would me much more likely to have a second serious
| condition diagnosed, purely because of increased
| attention from medical professionals._
|
| Does that apply to blindness at birth, though? I mean,
| you don't get continuing "treatment" or checkups for
| blindness, right? (At least, no more than a sighted
| person would go in for a yearly eye exam.) Obviously
| there are unique needs a blind person has to function in
| society, but it's not like something like cancer or a
| mental illness where you need to follow up and have
| continuing care and treatment for many years, possibly
| the rest of your life. For birth blindness, it's
| basically "yep, kid's blind; need to adapt to that", and
| that's it from the standpoint of medical care, no?
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| No.
| type0 wrote:
| That depends on the specialty, if the symptoms are
| overlapping and the treatment produces strange side
| effects - that diagnosis could be delayed for many years.
| type0 wrote:
| This could be a simple survivor bias. These are two highly
| debilitating conditions, chances are that they simply don't
| live long enough if it's severe, or if they do it just
| remains without diagnosis.
| vintermann wrote:
| You'd think there'd be case histories for it, though, if
| it was just that schizophrenia led to an early death for
| blind people.
| skat20phys wrote:
| This is a good point but similar kinds of phenomena could
| lead to something more benign but equally problematic.
|
| For example, let's say someone inherits (genetically or
| environmentally) etiologic factors for psychosis and
| blindness. It's possible that whatever these factors are,
| they are severe enough to have widespread enough effects
| that the person no longer receives a psychosis diagnosis,
| but instead some other diagnostic label that's more
| comprehensive in nature.
|
| Schizophrenia is really just a label for a semi-
| heterogeneous set of pathologies that might be labeled
| something else. I'm not saying that these problems don't
| exist, just that how they are perceived and described might
| vary a bit from scenario to scenario (this is one of the
| main impetuses for DSM-III and later actually). So someone
| with one pathology might receive a diagnosis of
| schizophrenia, someone else, bipolar disorder, and yet
| someone else developmental disorder NEC/NOS.
|
| It's entirely possible that if there is a negative
| correlation, it's because one reflects some preventative
| factors for the other, or something like that, but it's
| also possible that whatever causes the conjoint presence of
| the etiologies is catastrophic, leading to death, like you
| suggest, or the need for some entirely different label.
| mlyle wrote:
| Given that this is something that is talked about as a
| phenomenon, a psychiatrist encountering a congenitally blind,
| schizophrenic person would be really inclined to publish a
| case report... (e.g. not a 1 in 600 chance, and people with
| chronic mental health conditions tend to encounter more than
| one psychiatrist).
| touisteur wrote:
| Maybe that's the plan all along. 'huh strange correlation,
| let's put this in a paper, wait for case reports'. Might
| not be a bad process, if explicit.
| throwawayhhakdl wrote:
| I don't know if I believe that 3 / 10,000 people are born
| blind, in addition to the arithmetic errors
| stef25 wrote:
| Very interesting. I wonder if there's a link between melatonin
| production in the pineal gland (affected by visual perceptions of
| light) and endogenous DMT, also suspected of being produced in
| the pineal (see Rick Strassman's work)
|
| For a long time endogenous DMT, or some other endogenous
| psychoactive compound, was suspected of being a cause of
| schizophrenia. I think it's largely discredited by now anyway.
| stef25 wrote:
| EDIT - Too late to edit my original post, I should correct
| myself and say the theory has not been discredited (according
| to Dr Strassman himself)
| andai wrote:
| The endogenous psychoactive idea is fascinating. My friend
| called me during a psychosis, and I was convinced he was having
| a really bad psilocybin trip.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Modern research has actually found closer ties between
| psychosis and a different psychoactive compound:
| dynorphin[1]. In terms of recreational drugs, this is the
| neurotransmitter responsible for a salvia trip.
|
| From an outside standpoint, this makes more sense than the
| classical psychedelics. Unlike LSD or psilocybin, salvia
| hallucinations usually result in a total disconnect from
| reality, and the user is often rendered catatonic like in
| severe cases of schizophrenia.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632
| 231...
| psychonautLorax wrote:
| >Unlike LSD or psilocybin salvia hallucinations salvia . .
| . user is often rendered catatonic.
|
| Woah! Granted I've see only seen a handful of people use
| it, but it's the only drug which I seriously worry about it
| causing agitation/frenzy so severe as to induce outward
| violence.
| koboll wrote:
| I remember some of the first time I did salvia. I was
| sitting on a couch at the end of a room, and I looked up at
| the corner of the ceiling, where the ceiling met two walls.
| Then I looked back at the people I was sitting with, but
| all I could see was the corner of the ceiling, where the
| ceiling met two walls. Then after... seconds? A minute? An
| hour? I could see normally again, but the room I was in
| began to move backward. It detached from an enormous wall,
| where it was revealed to be one of an infinite grid of
| identical rooms.
|
| I don't remember the rest. Apparently all I did the whole
| time was stare with a blank expression for five minutes.
|
| Salvia. It's powerful stuff!
| andai wrote:
| A neverending salvia trip... I would not wish it upon my
| worst enemy.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Doesn't psilocybin work by overloading serotonin receptors in
| the brain? Seems like you could achieve that without DMT.
| [deleted]
| paulcole wrote:
| DMT, you say?
|
| It's entirely possible. My friend Jamie has a video about that.
| wysifnwyg wrote:
| Melatonin is broken up by sunlight exposure through the eyes,
| perhaps endogenous DMT might be impacted in a similar way?
| davebryand wrote:
| It's interesting that in the study they described, performed on
| blindfolded people, that their descriptions have similarities
| to the DMT experience:
|
| >>> One subject, a 29-year-old woman, saw a green face with big
| eyes when she was standing in front of where she knew there was
| a mirror--though she couldn't see it. Another 24-year-old man,
| by the end of the second day, was having difficulty walking
| because of all the hallucinations that appeared to be in his
| way. He reported seeing "mounds of pebbles, or small
| stones...and between them was running a small stream of water."
| By the end of the study, he reported seeing "ornate buildings
| of white-green marble" and "cartoon-like figures."
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