Hi everyone, what actually causes positive symptoms like visual and auditory hallucinations? Like what specifically dealing with the brain structure, function, and chemicals (News you have learned as of late) causes it?
The short answer is no one knows for sure. A much longer answer involves some specific dopamine receptors, a 1-10% loss of gray matter, and structural abnormalities caused by the way the brain develops during childhood and puberty. @twinklestars would have more scientific answers than that.
Like ninjastar said - not really understood. However they are working on understanding the biology of specific symptoms like voices.
To investigate the biological origins of hearing “voices” in patients with schizophrenia, a team led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai used ultra-high field imaging to compare the auditory cortex of schizophrenic patients with healthy individuals. They found that schizophrenic patients who experienced auditory hallucinations had abnormal tonotopic organization of the auditory cortex. Tonotopy is the ordered representation of sound frequency in the auditory cortex, which is established in utero and infancy and which does not rely on higher-order cognitive operations. The study findings, which appears this week in the Nature Partner Journal NPJ Schizophrenia , suggest that the vulnerability to develop “voices” is probably established many years before symptoms begin.
Yes, and I read somewhere that said that the visual lobe is what causes visual hallucinations as well.
In psychology courses they showed us studies about how the parietal lobe shrinks and dysfunction in SZ with MRIs. The parietal lobe is responsible for integrating and processing our senses so it makes sense that this causes the positive symptoms.
In advanced SZ like my case, the shrinking also affects the frontal lobe affecting executive function. That explains the negative and cognitive symptoms that some SZs have.
P.S I took psychology and neuroscience classes in university.
Here more about parietal lobe & SZ:
More about SZ brain abnormality, it appears that the temporal lobe is also affected, note the high SZs %, 100% of SZs have reduction in gray matter which are the neurons cell body:
“lateral ventricle enlargement is reported in 77%, and third ventricle enlargement in 67%. The temporal lobe was the brain parenchymal region with the most consistently documented abnormalities. Volume decreases were found in 62% of 37 studies of whole temporal lobe, and in 81% of 16 studies of the superior temporal gyrus (and in 100% with gray matter separately evaluated). Fully 77% of the 30 studies of the medial temporal lobe reported volume reduction in one or more of its constituent structures (hippocampus, amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus).”
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