© Reuters
A new study, led by University of New South Wales, has claimed that brain cells might become "stuck" in their journey during brain development to the outer "thinking" layer of the brain, which could be a cause of schizophrenia.
The scientists have found that in people with schizophrenia, brain cells destined for the cortex - the outer part of the brain associated with thinking and other cognitive abilities - could get trapped in the layer below.
"We think brain cells might be trapped while in the process of migrating to the cortex while the brain develops. This process of neuronal migration to the cortex doesn't stop at birth. It's robust in infants and may continue in teenage years and beyond.
"We know that brain development is derailed somehow in people with schizophrenia, and this study helps us understand how," said lead scientist Professor Cyndi Shannon Weickert.
The next step is to understand why these neurons are failing to complete their journey to the cortex, according to the scientists.
"Then maybe we can develop a therapy that encourages the neurons to keep moving to the finish line. Our hope is that this would reduce symptoms or even prevent schizophrenia from developing at all," she said.
The findings have been published in the latest edition of the Biological Psychiatry journal.
This reminds me of something I believe I may have read on the SOTT pages about a link between schizophrenia and parents who exhibit extreme swings in emotional behaviour that can lead to delusional or hallucinatory behaviour. an example might be a parent who tell's you they love you more than life itself one minute, and then mentally, physically or emotionally abuse you the next. The behaviour of this type, if what I'm learning is on the money, would suggest that at an early age a child would be conditioned to not only live and survive in an environment of extreme emotional and delusionary/hallucinatory behaviour patterns and like all kids, they would internalise this and then mimic the behaviour, likely to a more extreme degree.
Such extreme emotional "damage", of the actual formatory structures of the brain at the developmental stages, could certainly have the effect of inhibiting the routine migration of the brain cells, due to the lack of energy spent thinking and using the cognitive abilities (no energy, no growth), and instead spending the formatory years in a fully emotionally reactionary stage of development due to the environmental pressures. In writing this I'm starting to wonder if we have misunderstood schizophrenia, it would seem from my perspective to be a wholly emotionally based, driven and triggered disorder. To my mind this could better explain the extreme emotional reactions, that lead to strongly delusionary/hallucinatory behaviour patterns, what we may be seeing is the display of these childhood conditioned extreme emotional reaction patterns leading to brief psychosis type episodes when the behaviour becomes not just extremely emotionally reactionary, but also delusionary and hallucinatory. It seems to fit so far.