Alanna

Morton


Instructor: Malcolm Campbell
UWRT 1103
Due: April 6th, 2015

IQ at its Highest: Schizophrenia


The debate on whether or not an schizotypal individual is considered to be genius

Jenny Nguyen 4/13/15 10:32 PM

Comment [1]: Make sure entire header is
also double spaced like the rest of the paper
and the same font
Jenny Nguyen 4/13/15 10:31 PM
Comment [2]: No need for this
Jenny Nguyen 4/13/15 10:31 PM
Comment [3]: No need for this either,
date should be 6 April 2015 for MLA

or not is a huge controversy. What is the connection between schizophrenia and genius?
A stigma associated with schizophrenia the notion that those with the disease are insane.
Insanity is defined as the state of being seriously mentally ill. People tend to generally
think of anyone with a mental disease as having defects, but instead we should think and

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:07 AM

Comment [4]: Change to is
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Comment [5]: Change to severely

understand in depth both the pros and cons of the particular sickness that is being referred
to, such as schizophrenia. There is a very fine line between schizophrenia and genius.
This major debate takes into consideration the biology of the brain, the creative aspects of
thinking, and the personality and actions of a person. Whether we consider schizophrenia
to be a disease or a blessing will affect the population of those who have schizophrenia.
In fact, schizotypal individuals are believed to correlate more with genius than insanity
because certain forms of psychopathology are said to profoundly affect the neural
substrates for rule-based thought that can significantly influence the quantity of creative
production (SOURCE 2). Schizophrenia has been proven to have both negative and
positive effects on the individual. It is just a matter of which is more dominant: the

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:12 AM

Comment [6]: Too much information for
introduction, put in supporting paragraph
instead

negative or positive effects? Which treatment is most effective? What is the percentage of
people with schizophrenia capable of ignoring the altered reality associated with the
disease? And if schizophrenics have several cognitive impairments then why are they so
gifted in the area of creativity? I am going to propose the evidence to prove that there is
a correlation between schizophrenia and genius.

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:16 AM

Comment [7]: Put Lastly instead of
and to start of this sentence
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Comment [8]: Avoid first person is thesis,
make point more specific and stronger


What is the brain up to?
Schizophrenia is defined as a brain disorder which people interpret reality
abnormally. Individuals with the disease show affected enlarged ventricles in the brain
seen in CAT scans. A recent theoretical proposal has highlighted the potential competing
interactions between prefrontal and subcortical brain systems that determine the
appropriate level of cognitive control filtering over bottom-up information for optimal
task performance. (SOURCE 2) There is a stigma with schizophrenia that involves
people believing that schizotypal individuals only experience negative symptoms. Yes, it
is true that schizophrenics experience cognitive deficits and impairments of the emotional
drive, however they also experience positive symptoms such as hallucinations and
delusions. In fact, it has been found that this form of psychopathology that profoundly

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Comment [9]: Change to While it is true
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Comment [10]: Take out however

affects the neural substrates for rule-based thought in the brain can drastically influence
the quantity of creative production. In the current edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a German-American team of researchers, with the
cooperation of the Goethe University, reports that a selective dopamine midbrain
population that is crucial for emotional and cognitive processing shows reduced electrical
in vivo activity in a disease mouse model. (SOURCE 3) Their brain may appear

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:20 AM

Comment [11]: Place comma after
(PNAS)
Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:23 AM
Comment [12]: Since this is additional
information, separate using commas or s

differently on the screen and they may act differently at times than those without the
disease, but they are capable as being just as in control of their actions. It just depends on
the current chemistry going on in their brain and the medication and sometimes-even will
power that they struggle to win over to fight all of the false reality. In a sense,
schizophrenics have stronger will power because they can ignore the abnormal reality
their brain has stirred up into becoming reality.

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:24 AM

Comment [13]: Delete

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Comment [14]: Doesnt make sense,
reword


Personality Traits in the Schizotypal Individual

Schizotypal Individuals CAN Ignore the Altered Reality

In the 2001 movie, Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and produced by
Howard and Brian Grazer, the infamous case of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.
is captured as he undergoes the many problems encountered with the mental illness
schizophrenia. All the while captivating the divide between the notions of genius and
madness. The directors tremendously succeed in depicting the relationships among the
concepts of genius, madness, and alternate reality conceptualization, all of which Nash
faces throughout his life. Nashs mind divides into conscious genius and latent madness.
To counterweigh for his self-inflicted social isolation and need to succeed he appears to
unconsciously access his inactive madness and then to create a false reality to give him
the steadiness he needed to give full control to his creative thoughts. He had a burden,
which included a lot of stress for the need to be and to achieve something of significance.
This drove him to embrace his inherent madness to continue functioning at a high level of

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:25 AM

Comment [15]: Not a sentence, reword
Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:27 AM
Comment [16]: Instead of comma, put
hyphen
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Comment [17]: Delete
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Comment [18]: Comma after succeed
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Comment [19]: Replace with proceeds
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Comment [20]: Change to needs

mental awareness. Here we can very clearly see the correlation between schizophrenia
and genius because Nash is a living example. He embraced his mental illness and fought
off the abnormal reality or used it to engage in his mathematical thought process. As
Russell, B. ((1996). The conquest of happiness [First published as a Liveright paperback
1971: Reset and reissued 1996]. London, UK: W. W. Norton. [Original work published
1930].) said, One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that ones work is terribly important (p. 61) (SOURCE 1) This describes Nashs
predicament because in accessing his madness he increased his intelligence by allowing

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Comment [21]: Change to and


him to achieve an alternate conceptualization of reality, even though it also slowly
diminished his connection to reality. He was eventually able to even overcome these
struggles in the absence of medicine or any treatment.
HELP: What do the Treatments Involve?
Yes, some treatments are more affective than others when it comes to

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Comment [22]: Take out this

schizophrenia. While severe psychotic states of schizophrenia have been successfully

treated with psycho-pharmaceutical drugs for decades, cognitive scarcities and lack of
motivation dont respond well to standard drug therapy. This is a central problem because
as the long-term diagnosis of a patient is usually determined by the severity of the
negative symptoms. Consequently, the shortened average life span of about 25 years for
schizophrenia patients remained largely unaltered in recent decades. (SOURCE 3) "In
order to develop new therapy strategies we need an improved neurobiological
understanding of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia" explains Prof. Roeper of the
Institute for Neurophysiology of the Goethe University. (SOURCE 3)
The Best: Atypical or Conventional Antipsychotic Drugs

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:34 AM

Comment [23]: Further expand on quotes
and sources and how they contribute to
your thesis **remember to only put sources
or quotes if they directly contribute to your
thesis

An experiment was conducted where twenty-six patients (13 men, 13 women)

with schizophrenia were recruited from a long-term chronic care inpatient facility and
divided into two groups on the basis of their current medications in a between-subjects
design. More specifically, the medicaitons included thirteen patients (six men and seven
women) receiving clozapine (N=5), olanzapine (N=6), or risperidone (N=2). They were
compared to another group of thirteen patients (seven men and six women) receiving

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Comment [24]: Misspelled
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Comment [25]: Explain what this does


conventional neuroleptic medications. This was conducted to further describe the effects
of atypical antipsychotic medications compared to conventional antipsychotic
medications on schizophrenic patients and to which one was more affective. It was found
that certain medications effectively treat schizophrenics more efficiently than another
medication. This research concluded patient groups did not differ on clinical or
demographic measures. The results support the researchers hypothesis that patients
treated with atypical antipsychotic medications have normal P50 measures of sensory
gating. To clarify, P50 suppressions are used to study cognitive and intellectual
dysfunction. It is an operational measure of sensory gating that can be calculated by
averaging electroencephalographic responses to many pairs of auditory clicks separated
by 500 milliseconds. Usually, the second click is smaller than the response to the first
click. The researchers used this information to determine which patients, based on their
P50 suppressions, and should be treated with either of the two antipsychotic drugs. It was
determined that atypical antipsychotic medications have a greater efficiency in treating

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:51 AM

Comment [26]: Awesome!

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Comment [27]: Doesnt make sense,
reword

cognitive symptoms.
Whats going on in Your Prefrontal Cortex? (SOURCE 4 SOMEWHERE)
Professors at Goethe University performed a study with lab mice in order to
research the detected typical impairment in working memory with corresponding
neurochemical changes in dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. This would mainly prove
and show the likeliness of occurrence of schizophrenia in an individual during treatment
such as think processes like working memory. They were able to show, by using single
cell recordings in the intact brain of mice, that dopamine midbrain neurons are

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Comment [28]: Comma after treatment


responsible for emotional and cognitive processing. They displayed altered patterns and
frequencies of electrical activity. In contrast, contiguous dopamine neurons, which are
involved in the process of motor control, were not affected.
Lets Determine the Severity

Gifted in Creativity More than you Could Imagine

The five most prevalent types of schizophrenia (dis- organized, catatonic,
paranoid, residual, and undifferentiated, paranoid schizophrenia) are said to be in
about 40% of those with the disease. source 1The author takes all of these types
and compares them to the result of the effected schizophrenics level of creativity
and intelligence as a result of the disease. It is found to be much higher in

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:39 AM

Comment [29]: Could it be affected?

comparison with those who do not have the disease. The author presents that the
link between genius and madness dates back more than 2,000 years and continues
to the present. In fact, the emphasis in psychological research began to change from
genius to creativity and giftedness. (SOURCE 1)
Ironically, individuals with mental illness exhibit more creative abilities than
those without them. Patients with schizophrenia marked by psychotic features are shown
to exhibit significant disruptions in the front parietal control network. These
neurocognitive abnormalities in forms of psychopathology may extend periods of
hallucinations in the patients. Thus, altering dramatically the quantity of creative output
by increasing the generative phase of creative production. (SOURCE 2) I acknowledge
the concept that there is evidence of serious methodological limitations, correlational

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:40 AM

Comment [30]: Dropped quote;
introduce, explain, and analyze it. How does
it relate to your thesis?


designs, and problematically unidirectional interpretations for those with schizophrenia.
However, the more output of the individual the more likeliness there is to be a higher
quality of creativity. With creativity comes madness. If every creative individual thought
exactly the same as the next then there would be no creativity at all. To be unique we
must think outside of the box. An altered reality, although considered a negative
symptom of schizophrenia, can also morph itself into a positive symptom. There is a
correlation between schizophrenia and genius, and that is just it: the schizotypal
individual can be genius.

Jenny Nguyen 4/14/15 12:51 AM

Comment [31]: Great conclusion!



Works Cited Page
Griffith, Mary Bess. Alternate Reality Conceptualization: Venturing Along the Fine Line
Between Genius and Madness. Issues in mental health nursing, 2011; 32(10): 624-31.
Ramey, Christopher H. Not in their right mind: the relation of psychopathology to the
quantity and quality of creative thought. Frontiers in psychology, 2014; 5: 835.
Goethe University Frankfurt. "Schizophrenia: Impaired activity of the selective dopamine
neurons." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 19 Feb. 2015. Web.
7 Mar. 2015.
Light, G. A., Geyer, M. A., Clementz, B. A., Cadenhead, K. S., Braff, D. L. Normal P50
Suppression in Schizophrenia Patients Treated With Atypical Antipsychotic
Medications. The American Journal of Psychiatry. Volume 157 Issue 5, May 2000, pp.
767-771


Hey Alanna! Such an intellectual paper and very interesting topic youve written. Great
sources youve chosen for your research, including the movie. Ive also seen that movie in
my AP psych class before, so great choice for this topic. You have great facts and
information that ties back to your thesis, which is consistent throughout your paper, which
is great. You did a good job with your conclusion bringing everything together. Even though
I understand your thesis and main point, I would just polish up on your actual thesis a bit
more, to make it stronger. I definitely got that argumentative tone from your paper, good
job. For my comments, Ive just added some suggestions on deleting certain words and
changing certain words. Rewording some sentences to help readers understand certain
sentences also. Remember to explain your quotes and sources and of course add in your
citations and fix works cited page to MLA format. Great paper.

Jenny J