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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

One interesting question to think about is what we can learn about the architecture / algorithms used by the human brain through its failure modes.

The article explains Tausk's views on this specific question from 1919 (schizophrenia, he said, involves "loss of ego-boundaries"), but surely others have looked at the question since then -- what have they found?

If schizophrenia has something to do with some self-referential part of the cognitive machinery being broken, it seems like this might be a very important clue to how the brain works algorithmically -- self-reference is very important part of the theory of computation (recursion theorem, halting problem, Godel, etc.), and understanding how the human brain handles it seems like it may be informative.

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As a recovered schizoaffective (bipolar with schizophrenic qualities in the ups and downs) I very much believe that schizophrenia reveals a lot about the brains inner wiring.

Schizophrenia is, from my experience, very much like autism. It is actually also along a spectrum; but more importantly: it's not even necessarily a bad thing.

Just like autistic people have started referring to normal people as 'neurotypical,' I'm fairly certain schizophrenics once used to be a very important part of society: the mystics.

From my personal experience schizophrenia is extreme pattern matching to the point of solipsistic union not with 'reality' but with all of your sensory inputs.

That might have to do with my personal experience, where there where not so much voices as an all encompassing ubermind which would manifest itself as a single voice which you would call 'intuition' but for me was more of deity.

One of the best sayings I've found since then is: 'The mystic swims in the same ocean the schizophrenic drowns in.'

I've heard that from Pema Chödrön as "A psychotic drowns in the very same stuff a mystic swims in."

As a mystic that sounds right. I have no knowledge of schizophrenic phenomenon, but it seems to be adjacent territory. The only difference may be that mystical experiences are deeply educational.

Have you read The Madness of Adam and Eve?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Madness-Adam-Eve-Schizophrenia/dp/...

I have not; but I will now. Do wish it was on Kindle though...

I used to worry about schizophrenia after seeing the (incredibly unrealistic) portrayal of it in A Beautiful Mind. The way I've always imagined or modeled it working is as if there's a separate consciousness that it actively trying to trick the "real you" into being paranoid. Of course, that adversarial consciousness is simply your brain, just like the "real you." It is extremely weird and disturbing that a failure state can seem to behave like this. The "adversary" used to use demons, back when people literally believed in demons or had demons as a part of their culture, but it has to change its tactics when the culture changes.

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