Humour has a way of softening the most brutal of discoveries!

The challenge of trying to make sense of the biology of some of the really interesting things we do as humans, including invented belief systems, is recognizing us as just another off-the-rack mammal. Some of the time it's just another plain-old mammal using standard physiology in utterly unstandard ways, and some of the time it's built around us being unlike anything that's ever existed before on this planet.

Now, when you put together all these realms of knowledge--people studying the genetics of the brain, the early experience, the hormones and neurotransmitters--what you wind up seeing is, we're getting an amazing amount of insight about all sorts of outposts of our behavior. What one has to be left with is a certain awe at the mechanistic feel of all of it: how we are sort of products of the material bases of our brains.

This last sentence sums up the slightly uneasy sense of enlightenment I'd feel tingling through my rapidly dwindling grey matter as Sven's comments would show up regarding how the brain works.

Here's a scenario: 40-year-old guy, 20-year happy marriage, white-collar job, living in the suburbs, utterly colorless, stable life. One day, from out of nowhere, he punches somebody in the face at work, in his office, some guy at the water cooler who had made some comment about a sports team. This guy hasn't had a fight since junior high school. Utterly bizarre, unprecedented. Three months later, his wife of this 20-year marriage discovers he's been having an affair with a 17-year-old kid at the checkout down at the supermarket. Totally bizarre. Three months later, he's arrested for drunken brawling in a bar--and he never even used to drink. Three months later, he embezzles the funds from his workplace, disappears, and is never seen again.

How can we explain this guy?

Explanation number one: the guy is no damned good. [laughter]

Explanation number two: he's having the world's most dramatic and childish midlife crisis.

Explanation number three: it's a neurological disease; he has a single-gene defect that makes him do this.

This, amazingly, is what a particular neurological disease looks like, a disease called Huntington's Disease, Huntington's chorea. Huntington's chorea is most famous for a neuro-muscular disorder: it starts with a tremoring, and by the time it's done with, you have your entire body writhing--absolutely horrendous. It kills you within a decade or so. It gets you in your mid-40s, Woody Guthrie being the most famous Huntington's Disease case. Three or four years before it's a neurological disease, it's a psychiatric disorder. You see precisely the profile that was just described: people become disinhibited. You find Huntington's patients are famed for always showing up in the dayroom in the hospital having forgotten to wear half of their pajamas, and things of that sort. It causes a massive disinhibition of the personality, and initially, it's a psychiatric disorder. It's not a mid-life crisis--it's a single-gene defect.

Holy Having A Cow!

So you then begin to ask, "What do modern neuroscience and psychiatry begin to tell us about how we as a species invent these systems of belief, these systems of organized, shared, ritualized, culture-bound beliefs?" What does this tell us about religion?

It turns out there's a whole bunch of outposts where neuropsychiatry tells us something about the stuff we keep creating in culture after culture. Let me tell you about two very interesting examples of this, amid many.

One of them has to do with one of the great puzzles when people think about the evolution of psychiatric disorders. Ever deal with anybody with one of the most horrendous of all psychiatric diseases, schizophrenia, and you come away just appalled at how a life can be demolished by some biological storm in the brain. Schizophrenia: a disease of disordered thought, disconnected socialization, hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, a 50% rate of attempted suicide. This is a totally disastrous disease, and it's one that we're very, very slowly beginning to understand the neurochemistry of.

One of the keys about schizophrenia is that it's a disorder with a genetic component. That doesn't mean it is genetically guaranteed. It is not genetically determined. There is a genetic risk for this disease, as is the case with most psychiatric disorders.

The minute you see there's any genetics on the scene, you've got to ask an evolutionary question, which is: "Where did these genes evolve from?" Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have.

What's evolution about? Evolution is the process by which adaptive traits become more common. Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. You can show this formally: schizophrenics have a lower rate of leaving copies of their genes in the next generation than unaffected siblings. By the rules, by the economics of evolution, this is a maladaptive trait. Yet, it chugs along at a one to two percent rate in every culture on this planet.

So what's the adaptive advantage of schizophrenia? It has to do with a classic truism--this business that sometimes you have a genetic trait which in the full-blown version is a disaster, but the partial version is good news.

What's the example we all learned in the textbook case? Sickle-cell anemia: full-blown version, fatal hematological disorder; partial version, you don't get malaria. Tay Sachs disease: full-blown version, your nervous system is destroyed within a couple of months of life; partial version, you're resistant to tuberculosis. Cystic fibrosis: full-blown version, you're typically dead by 20; partial version, you're resistant to cholera. This turns out to be a theme with a lot of human genetics. As long as there's enough folks with the advantageous partial version, you can afford the occasional cousin with the full-blown version.

Aaaaah, copy that...

The first study that found genetic evidence for schizophrenics looked at about 20,000 people adopted in Denmark, looking at patterns of inheritability of schizophrenia; were you likely to share schizophrenic traits with your adopted parents, or your biological parents?

This was a massive multi-year study. Psychiatrists talked to more relatives of schizophrenics than any psychiatrists had ever done before in a career. What they noticed was, there's something kind of weird about relatives of schizophrenics--not every single one of them, but at higher than expected rates. This "kinda weirdness" is now called "schizotypal personality."

What is schizotypal? It's a more subtle version of schizophrenia. This is not somebody who's completely socially crippled; they're just solitary, detached: these are the lighthouse keepers, the projectionists in the movie theaters. These are not people who are thought-disordered to the point of being completely nonfunctional; these are people who just believe in kinda strange stuff. They are into their Star Trek conventions. They're into their astrology, they're into their telepathy and their paranormal beliefs, they're into--and you can see now where I'm heading [laughter]--very, very literal, concrete interpretations of religious events.

Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words." [laughter] You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops." [laughter] This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

What you find with schizotypals is what is called metamagical thinking, a very strong interest in new-age beliefs, science fiction, fantasy, religion, but in a very concrete, literal form, a very fundamentalist style. Somebody walking on water is not a metaphor. Somebody rising from the dead is not a metaphor; this is reported, literal fact.

Now we have to ask our evolutionary question: "Who are the schizotypals throughout 99% of human history?" And in the 1930s, decades before the word "schizotypal" even existed, anthropologists already had the answer.

It's the shamans. It's the medicine men. It's the medicine women. It's the witch doctors. In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly. It's the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. It's the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking. When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. What's very clear, though, is they all have a limit on the number of shamans. That is this classic sort of balanced selection of evolution. There is a need for this subtype--but not too many.

The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. It's a milder, more controlled version.

Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from. What this shamanistic theory says is, it's not schizophrenia that's evolved, it's schizotypal shamanism that's evolved. In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic. That's the argument; and it's a very convincing one.

If you look at all these 1930s and 1940s anthropologists, there's a certain dead-white-male racism that runs through all of this stuff that anthropology still has not recovered from. If you read their writings, what was between the lines--and often not between the lines--was, this is about "them." This is about the folks with the bones in their noses and no clothes who wind up in the National Geographic nudie pictures. These are them and their subjective paranormal beliefs; thank God we live in objective modern societies. [laughter]

I've quoted enough, if you enjoyed what he has to say, you can click the link and read the rest.

Why it's personal...

One of my grandfathers spent 40 years committed in an asylum with dementia, the other one narrowly missed that fate, the few stories that survived the victorian shame blackout on his vagaries have me pretty sure of a genetic component on that side of the family towards schizophrenia also.

When I was 17 psychiatrists wanted to have me committed for schizophrenia, and I talked my caregivers out of it. The next year found me incarcerated in a prison for the criminally insane for three months, exiting due to luck and lawyers.

What I saw there affected me deeply, and even though it was 30+ years ago, I can still remember acutely many details, many i'd happily forget, and some which stayed as positive life lessons.

Life has offered enough ways to maintain psychic equilibrium that I can stay out of trouble, (some here may not agree!),  every day brings its special challenges to stay 'sane', or as close to that wind as I can sail. ET has been wonderful therapy in this regard, and I thank you all for your collective intelligent humanity and wicked funny insights.

'Ok, I may be mad, but most of the others (you included) are way madder, they just don't know it'.

That's been my mantra for many decades, and it's kept me going. As we shift into post-industrial mode I have a hunch things will get easier in some ways, as what really screws up reception is the staggering amount of trivia, and the hysterical reporting of it, an orgy of banality, the 'all noise, no signal' nature of so much social discourse while really important group survival issues are left relatively unconsidered.

ET is where I've found these really important issues I've tossed awake nights over addressed, with warmth, wit and wisdom.

I hope you all enjoyed the read, perhaps some here will recognise schizotypical traits in themselves, and be willing to discuss them. I know how much shame is associated with mental illness, having felt (and been) suicidal on several occasions during my sojourn here on this once-fair planet, due to the existential alienation I experience(d), but am happy to say that each day brings new hope that balance can be found, and that I can make my life worthier of the space and resources I consume.

Rage, depression and a rather manic approach to art have all been friends along the way, acceptance and sharing have been slow in coming, but bring some much-needed peace after decades of self-corroding angst, dysfunction and self-hatred.

Redemption takes many shapes and forms; as the relativity of cultural assumptions becomes clearer, the years of living on the abyss's edge seem to have somewhat preparational for what's unfolding, though much remains largely to be seen and tested. Mostly, concern about the external drama of the global social challenges rearing up to meet us has finally outpaced my solipsistic inner wrestling with concepts that always seemed strangely removed from 'consensus' reality, yet seemed like they somehow underpinned it, in a largely unacknowledged way.

I'll never be 'normal', but I can be useful, and let go of the need to cover shame about my condition with braggadocio and false pride in being 'weird'.

Such egoism.... (more than) enough (hell, way too much) about me...what do you all think about this lecture? Does it ring explicative bells for you too? Anyone read any of his books? Have others here been branded by psychiatry and its oft-facile terminology? If so, what helps you cope?

Thanks for listening,

Peace out

melo