http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666075/ This imaging study has shown that schizophrenics, as well as manic-depressives, may have developed asymmetrically in the hippocampus and/or hypothalamus regions of the brain. This would tend to initiate further distortion upon the tuber cinereum. Is it possible, by this, that the pineal body would release DMT at unpredictable moments, inducing both auditory and visual halucintaions?
Schizophrenia is a collection of symptoms and difficult to accurately diagnose. Maybe 10% over a few years? Low vitamin D also correlates well with schizophrenia. There's a study on connection speeds between right and left hemispheres that was interesting.
I found David Eagleman's work fascinating. He's currently pursing the hypothesis that schizophrenia might fundamentally be a disorder of time perception. You can imagine that if your normal time perception were impaired, you would have a very fragmented cognition (as schizophrenic patients do). “To understand the neural mechanisms of time perception, we combine psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. We are currently engaged in experiments that explore temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, time perception in schizophrenia, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. We use this data to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.” http://eaglemanlab.net/
Hi, Michael. Pleased to meet you. I'm learning about these areas and I too find it all fascinating. Dr. Rick Strassman's work at UNiversity of New Mexico is interesting IMO. Can you provide a link to some of that? Thank you for the post.
Hi Trooper, Pleased to meet you also. Amazing! Have you, after taking that in, considered that this may just as well relate to "normal" perception as it's limits of less than 100 frames per second blur or dismiss the millions of interstices between those frames? I'll get a link to Strassman's work. Like most research, it isn't perfect, but there are MORE perfect aspects. Thank you for your post.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=Dr Rick Strassman DMT schizophrenia&pc=ZUGO&form=ZGAIDF This is the Bing search. There's a number of different articles and sites about this. Strassman used DMT in a controlled environment to examine similarities in near death situations. He also found a connection to schizophrenia and DMT in the pineal body, stored and released during extreme stress of near death. http://www.realitysandwich.com/voyaging_dmt_space_with_dr_rick_strassman_md This is one site that has some discussion along with the article. This study relates to all this, still I'm mostly wanting to explore the deformity research. It is wide open to schizophrenic studies in general. Perhaps we will all learn a bit in this weird mental condition. Another consideration someone brought up to me once involved a philosophy called bicameralism. I want to explore that at some time when I can. That philosophy were it verifiable, might challenge whether schizophrenia would truly be considered abnormal. In this century we are learning so much more so much faster.
Good morning. I'm curious about the possible connection of the step by step reactions where the halucinagenic s precursors are stored in and released from the pineal gland. Not from the viewpoint of anything other than dreams often seem like halucinations only our eyes are closed. Strassman, in one of his reports, apparently claimed that DMY would incite a condition similar to schizophrenia. In chemistry, when we establish a particular process, it tends to exhaust a reaction as free radicals become less available, then other isomers may form, so a resultant must be washed to remove the undesired isomer. I'm wondering if, asymmetrical lobes could effectively change the "apparatus" and produce an undesirable result from these precursors, thus halucinations. It is also a matter of curiosity whether the so-called "spirit molecule" would cause time distortion by desynchronizing the frame by frame processing of the tubers cinereum. An example relative to this would be a crack in the lenses of a movie projector, say to the extent the fracture actually dislodged part of the lense so the image was being partly projected off the screen.
Double entendre? Except hallucination permeates the conscious state, requiring the deation of an alternate reality. These ideations can accrete and present as chronic psychosis. And so that is entirely different than being asleep. As will a bottle of tequila, traumatic brain injury, fever, a genetic cause, or news that a loved one has died. So we wouldn't want to omit the full scope of this science and jump to conclusions. That would require a complex inquiry into hormonal-neural interactions at the biochemical level. Is that your intent, to delve into the deep end? It's a matter of curiosity whether your curiosity in a "spirit-molecule" is an excursion into Creation Pseudoscience. Presumably you're not a neurologist, or you wouldn't have misspelled tuber cinereum. Are you going to expound on how this mechanism works? "Frame by frame processing"? What does that mean to you? Huh? Is this an accepted analogy? Are we going to assume a working knowledge of medicine and psychology before the thread establishes a premise?
from the subsequent link you posted. Is this another covert excursion into Pseudoscience? Be advised: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/why-science-and-religion-_1_b_879022.html Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Strassman's work is not the main focus of the discussion. His work was brought in to explore the possibilities of the precursor free radicals completing the steps to the brain's manufacture of a hallucinogen in scizophrenics, still the subject of dreams and EXTREME STRESSORS such as NDE's enters the subject of schizophrenia as a comparative. Whether Dr. Strassman's work is pseudoscience or not is up to debate somewhere else, but the topic here is not about him, it simply needs to look beyond the fluff of his work to see the chemistry aspects. The concept of DMT being the cause of hallucinations in a schizophrenic may have some validity. I'm not holding a torch for Strassman's work. Just to clear that up. I don't rush in to dismiss every aspect of a pseudoscientific study. An amateur astronomer, for example, often discovers CB's first, contrasted to the pseudscientist that sometimes pulls a small relevancy from bad science.
Another way to look at the hallucinations in schizophrenics, would be to parallel this to an awakened dream state. If we had a dream that was very real, nobody would get too upset of we told them. But if the same dream happened while conscious and awake, so the boundaries between the dream and direct sensory input is being distorted, people would get upset. If I close my eyes and imagine a warm sunny beach this is fine. But if this same mental image was there, after I open my eyes this would be treated as abnormal. It is considered OK, either one at a time (dream or sensory), but not both at the same time. The sensory and dream states are like a two way switch; one or the other. But there appears to also be a middle setting in some people which is less common. Maybe the asymmetry might explain the asymmetry in the two way switch. Picture a child with a nightmare. He wakes up and is still afraid. His conscious mind may be aware he is in his room, but the emotional ambience of the dream is still there. He is not exactly seeing anything from the dream, but has a gut feeling the monster is in the closet behind the door. This does not count as a hallucination since he does not "see" anything. But still there are two affects sensory and emotional reaction from the imagination. You may need to get him to look with his eyes, in the closet, so the switch is flipped.
:thumbsup: Very good post. A person having a psychotic break may not only be seeing, but acting within the conscious hallucination. There's a movie with Russel Crowe "A Beautiful Mind," that demonstrates this.
