Connecting the Dots... When the Connector is Broken

Health and Recovery
1

“People with schizophrenia seem to have a bias towards theoretical rationality over and above practical rationality.”

Owen, Cutting, David: Are people with schizophrenia more logical than healthy volunteers? The British Journal of Psychiatry, Oct 2007, 191 (5) 453-454; http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/191/5/453

(See the article about the research at the link below.)

http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005699.html#

“…the available evidence suggests that deficits in logical reasoning are more likely to occur due to faulty assessment of premises than to a defect in the structure of inferences. Such deficits seem to be provoked (in healthy individuals) or exacerbated (in patients with schizophrenia) by emotional content. The hypothesis is offered that delusional ideation is primarily affect-driven, and that a mechanism present in healthy individuals when they are emotionally challenged may be inappropriately activated in patients who are delusional.”

Mujica-Parodi, Malaspina, Sackeim: Logical processing, affect, and delusional thought in schizophrenia, Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 2000 Jul-Aug, 8 (2) 73-83.

“…schizophrenic patients were impaired in all reasoning conditions, but more critically, patient performance failed to improve in the non-salient belief condition … suggesting that they are unable to fully mobilize the… reasoning mechanism, associated with the frontal–temporal lobe system.”

Vinod Goel *
Department of Psychology, York University,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

Angela Bartolo
David St. Clair
Annalena Venneri
Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen,
King’s College, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland, UK

4 June 2002

http://www.yorku.ca/vgoel/reprints/Goel_Bartolo_StClair_Venn.pdf

I could go on here (there were 114K results when I entered “schizophrenia logical reasoning” in a Google search box). The point is that neither do psychotic spectrum patients perceive, nor do we “connect the dots,” very well, especially when we are stressed and emotional. (Most people don’t, but we are far more often stressed and emotional than “normies.”)

Is there a “fix” for this? Medication compliance will help with the stress and the emotional lability, BUT… meds cannot do anything about our tendency to think theoretically rather than practically, meaning “connect the dots” on the basis of actual evidence rather than wild ideas. For that, one will have to at least learn critical thinking skills (see below) and may have to get them via the psychotherapies listed further below. because these c/r skills are what bring the frontal-temporal lobe system up to speed and into play.

http://www.knowledgereform.com/2015/01/14/critical-thinking-6-critical-questions-to-think-about/

http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

REBT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_emotive_behavior_therapy
Schematherapy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_Therapy
Learned Optimism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism
Standard CBT – https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/Psychotherapy & scroll down
DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
MBSR – http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php
MBCT - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22340145
ACT – https://contextualscience.org/act
Vipassana – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassanā
MBBT – https://www.newharbinger.com/blog/introduction-mind-body-bridging-i-system
SEPT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_Experiencing
SMPT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorimotor_psychotherapy
10 StEP – http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-10-steps-of-emotion-processing.html

2 Likes
2

Does anyone here actually enjoy you lecturing us on how flawed we are and you telling us how we should act?

3

Honestly @notmoses, if I had to make a jest about you I’d say that if you we’re replaced with a robot it’d be hard to tell the difference.

1 Like
4

I think Mrs. Pixel would like for me to be less rational.

Pixel.

1 Like
5

personally @notmoses has helped me gain insight and understanding into my illness.
of course a lot of it is over my head…but i am not against being educated. :books:
take care :alien:

2 Likes
6

I mainly listen to myself during the day lately. Now I am trying to follow a voice. I have disregarded the part of your post on delusional thinking because I see no delusions in my thinking. I didn’t read the part about critical thinking because I know I don’t think well critically. Anyway, this day is over. I have to prepare dinner, eat it, worry about going to bed too early and then take my medication and go to bed. Thank you, notmoses for your interesting post. Your posts are too heavily laden with extraneous material I don’t find pertinent to my life, but they are interesting to me because I like to analyse your thinking and put together a profile of you in my mind that I can relate to further on down the line.

2 Likes
7

Interesting find, matches up with a bunch of other recent articles I read on the topic. And helps to make sense of personal experience here. It nuances the idea that sz’s are just ‘faulty reasoners’. On such an (old-fashioned?) conception, the ‘reasoning faculty’ is said to be impaired in sz. In a broad sense, such may be accurate, in a narrow sense surely not. Our reasoning may not always be sound, but it is typically just as valid as that of neurotypicals. That is to say we do not so much fall victim to logical fallacies more than neurotypicals, it is, as the article you cite states, rather that we reason from different premises. Such a nuanced view on reasoning makes more sense to my personal experience, where I’d have no problems completing a graduate level course on formal logic while floridly psychotic.

(http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Validity_vs._soundness)

1 Like