This article, Immaturity Of The Brain May Cause Schizophrenia, talks about one of the possible causes of a disease which may actually be “several biologically distinct heterogeneous populations,” that is, a set of symptoms caused by various diseases. This was the case for ‘consumption’ in the 1800s — TB or lung cancer or some variety of the ‘rattles’ as miners called black lung conditions? Consumption might have been any of those or other diseases.
I’ll give two quotes from this article:
The underdevelopment of a specific region in the brain may lead to schizophrenia in individuals. According to research published today in BioMed Central’s open access journal Molecular Brain, dentate gyrus, which is located in the hippocampus in the brain and thought to be responsible for working memory and mood regulation, remained immature in an animal model of schizophrenia.
AND
Despite extensive research, the brain mechanisms of schizophrenia remain largely unknown. According to Professor Miyakawa, one reason for this is that clinical diagnosis in the area of psychiatry is based solely on subjective observations and not on biologically or objectively solid criteria, “As a result of this limitation, most of the psychiatric disorders currently diagnosed as a single disorder are likely to comprise several biologically distinct heterogeneous populations. Therefore, the identification and investigation of more reliable biomarkers that characterize a single subpopulation of a specific psychiatric disorder are essential for increasing the understanding of the pathogenesis/pathophysiology of such disorders.”
Advances in the understanding or treatment of such a horrible disease as schizophrenia are to be applauded, but my interest lies in the possibility of ‘symptoms’ of psychosis or other mental disorders appearing in a much quieter form in those who appear normal, at least in the context of modern societies. See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a discussion of this issue in the context of the worldview I’m developing.
The late Professor Julian Jaynes published a controversial book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in 1976 “in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.” [The quote is from the Wikpedia article.]
There are various ways to approach the possibility that the mind is the result of some sort of development process which began — perhaps — when men began to gather in complex societies about 10,000 years ago or so. While I would have to believe in an intermediary stage, perhaps the hallucinatory state conjectured by Jaynes, I’d tend to believe that pre-urban man might have had a level and type of consciousness closer to that of chimpanzees than to modern men. In any case, I’m speculating that the process reached an important stage of maturity about 600BC or so when the Books of Moses were redacted and pulled together with the Books of the Kings and other texts during the reign of King Josiah. This was about the same time when unknown Vedic scholars of the highest creative talents were creating the fundamental works of the Hindus and also the time when Homer’s descendants were becoming the ancestors of Socrates.
I’m working on an entry which looks at this development of the brain by quick consideration of arguments presented by Bruno Snell (The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature) and R.B. Onians (The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate). I started thinking upon those lines after simply deciding that the mind, like any other complex attribute of a physical creature, could not have simply appeared by magic. It had to have developed by some sort of process within the general stream of biological evolution, though maybe it could have only begun when the evolution of the human brain reached a certain point. There might be a minimum brain-complexity (to speak simplistically) as well as necessary environmental conditions supplied by that period of human history from the birth of large-scale agriculture and cities (circa 10,000BC) to the ‘sudden’ emergence of such phenomena as conceptual thought as seen in the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets producing complex narratives and using tools such as irony or self-deprecation (both of which are highly developed by the time of Socrates).
I’ve not yet tried to nail down a definition of mind from my viewpoint, but I generally consider it to be the relational aspects of a human being, including relationships to various other aspects of that human being as well as to his environment and any greater aspects of reality which he may be able to conceive on the basis of rational and imaginative efforts. I suspect this works not just because of complex brain-cell networks but also the non-local properties of those electromagnetic fields generated by the brain and not yet understood by brain-scientists. This would account for the ethereal feel of the mind as well as for some such phenomena as the rapid combination of multiple streams of perception into one view of the surrounding environment.
Given the complexity and the powerful but ad-hoc nature of the human mind — whatever its exact nature, there seems to be every reason to believe the mind developed by some sort of selection process after the physical foundation — a complex human brain — existed. The very existence of problems like schizophrenia point to the developmental nature of the mind and point to an instability of sorts in the ‘physical’ or ‘relational’ processes which drive the development forward, or fail to drive it forward. We must also recognize the mind is not likely to be an entity like the heart so that it exists and functions automatically in any live-birth human being. For example, we have no reason to believe that any of those feral children, legendary or real, who were raised by wolves had human minds even if their brains were as healthy as those of a child in a modern literate environment.
What can develop can fail to develop and can also unwind or otherwise decay if that development is towards a dynamic sort of entity. Cultural decay of various sorts can perhaps lead to a society where many fail to develop well-ordered, mature human minds. Hardly a surprising suggestion, but one which can lead to richer ways of speaking of the possible problem in the context in which I’ve set it. It’s also a suggestion that raises some very frightening questions, including some which would impact our understanding of our human selves and — to a Christian — our understandings of the possibilities and nature of salvation. We also should perhaps wonder how long it can take to recover after a period of cultural decay and whether a recovery will necessarily occur if the human mind as we know it is the result of not only individual development processes over the life of the individual but also of a development process involving communities of human beings, probably family lines. These sorts of developmental processes will likely be somewhat self-sustaining so long as they continue in a robust form. But, if disrupted, those contingent processes might not restart if the circumstances aren’t right.
In Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Professor Louis Sass discussed the implications of the similarities between the ways of thought of schizophrenics and those of modern artists and thinkers. (See the already referenced A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism.) He also pointed to evidence that schizophrenia is a modern disease — for example, the extensive networks of humane institutions for disturbed people which existed from the Middle Ages onwards provide no evidence of such a disease prior to the late 1700s. It was about that time that an alienist (psychiatrist, roughly speaking) noted the very strange symptoms of a likely schizophrenic as if he’d never imagined such a form of psychosis could exist. This is a very complex issue, especially given the growing evidence that there is no clear-cut dividing line between schizophrenia and some serious forms of depression and perhaps other sorts of mental disturbances. For now, I’ll ignore the various complexities and raise the possibility that our modern forms of social, political, and intellectual life are not appropriate for human beings — they might lead to a decay of that structure we call a human mind.
There are some interesting lines of thought which could be spun out and some of those are quite frightening. For a while, I’ll be returning to some basic questions about the nature of a human being and the nature of Creation, with plans to work towards some serious understanding of causation in its various forms and to continue trying to encounter the Bible in such a way as to produce readings more consistent with modern empirical knowledge. (This doesn’t mean twisting St. Paul to turn him into a prophet of Einstein as well as a prophet of God. It does mean understanding the teachings of St. Paul in the context of an understanding of Creation richer and more accurate than any understanding possible to him.)