NeuroLogic: The Brain's Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior by Eliezer Sternberg

Author:Eliezer Sternberg [Sternberg, Eliezer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
ISBN: 9780307908773
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-11T23:00:00+00:00

This seemed like a good time to end the interview, but still my mind was flooded with questions. Why does Brandon hear a voice in his head? Where does it come from? Why does it say what it says?

Aside from auditory hallucinations, schizophrenics experience a number of other mysterious symptoms too. Some have delusions, outlandish beliefs that patients will assert with the utmost certainty. The delusions may be paranoid, such as thinking you are being spied on by the FBI, or supernatural, such as believing you are being zapped by aliens. Some schizophrenics believe that their behaviors are controlled by mystical forces outside themselves. One patient I met in the psych ward, Jenna, told me that her actions were controlled by an electrical force field emanating from her television after she watched Wheel of Fortune. Other schizophrenics report instances of “thought insertion,” in which they feel as if their thoughts don’t belong to them and that someone else—a person, a spirit, or even the FBI—planted those thoughts in their minds. Larry, a patient who had lost his sister to drug overdose, told me that his sister’s spirit haunted him. According to Larry, she liked to “lend him her thoughts,” which he felt compelled to act upon. That, at least, explained the mystery of his blond pigtails and ladybug hairpin.

Some schizophrenics display disorganized thinking, meaning that they tend to make strange connections between ideas. In the movie A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe plays the mathematician John Nash, a Nobel laureate who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. In one scene, his wife (played by Jennifer Connelly) discovers his office, finding magazine and newspaper articles strewn throughout, connected by strings and erratically highlighted, with incomprehensible writings scrawled all over the walls. This is a dramatization of disorganized thinking, though to Crowe’s character and to other schizophrenics it seems clearheaded and logical.

Brandon not only claims to hear a voice in his head but communicates with it; he and the invisible “Gerald” often have arguments, one of which I briefly witnessed. The voice is so real to him that Brandon gave it a name. Gerald has a personality, perhaps not a very pleasant one (he’s an “asshole”), but a personality nonetheless. He has a profession as an FBI agent and an agenda, which includes spying on Brandon and encouraging suicide or homicide. Most disturbing, Brandon is tormented by this apparition, an invader in his mind that mocks him, deceives him, and bullies him to obey its will. The hallucination is pervasive and, when untreated, hopelessly inescapable. How could this illusion be so powerful?

However convincing that experience might be for Brandon, it would seem unlikely that he is actually hearing voices through the processing of sound waves detected by his eardrums. After all, nobody else hears them. The only reasonable assumption seems to be that he is imagining these voices. As we try to answer the question of why schizophrenics hear voices, the initial problem facing us is that the voices are in their heads. How, as

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