Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

Author:Robert Kolker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

1979

University of Colorado Medical Center, Denver, Colorado

Robert Freedman and Lynn DeLisi never worked in the same lab or even the same research institution or hospital. They were just two of hundreds of researchers around the world who were investigating schizophrenia. Their specialties were different, too—two disparate approaches to the same problem. While DeLisi wanted to track down the genetic components of schizophrenia, Freedman was on the hunt for a physiological understanding of the illness. She wanted to learn where it came from; he wanted to learn how it worked.

Neither of them knew that their paths one day would merge in the study of one extraordinary family—and that what they would learn from that family would help them both unearth new knowledge about the disease.

While DeLisi’s path to a career in medicine was riddled with detours, Freedman’s had been more or less seamless. He graduated from Harvard in 1968, two years after DeLisi graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and entered Harvard Medical School right away. As an undergraduate, Freedman had been drawn to the idea that the human mind could synthesize its own, entirely separate reality. “It just seemed to me if there was ever a disease that was uniquely human and philosophical, it was having schizophrenia,” he said. At the same time, Freedman was fascinated by the physical body, particularly the workings of the central nervous system. After medical school, he directed his career toward the study of the brain, starting off with the belief that there must be a better way to learn why neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine did what they did.

Freedman understood from a new flurry of research that people with schizophrenia might have difficulty processing all the information sensed by the central nervous system in an efficient way. This “vulnerability hypothesis”—an update, or elaboration, of Irving Gottesman’s 1967 diathesis-stress hypothesis, introduced by a team of researchers from Harvard and Columbia in 1977—sought a middle ground between nature and nurture by suggesting that certain genetic traits directly compromised the brain’s sensory and information-processing functions, making the brain especially vulnerable to any number of environmental triggers. To these researchers, those triggers—anything from everyday heartbreak, to chronic poverty, to traumatic child abuse—didn’t cause schizophrenia as much as provide “an opportunity for vulnerability to germinate into disorder.” And that vulnerability, many thought, was really an issue with “sensory gating,” or the brain’s ability (or inability) to correctly process incoming information. A sensory gating disorder was the most common explanation for the schizophrenia experienced by John Nash—the Nobel Laureate mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind—who was able to detect patterns no one else could, and yet also was prone to delusions and visions of beings who were out to get him. Both of those aspects of Nash’s personality were said to be products of the same hypersensitivity.

Neurons talk to one another through brain synapses, the junctions between nerve cells that are essential for sending messages through the central nervous system. Many researchers came to suspect that the John Nashes of the world weren’t able to prune their synapses in the same way as most people.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.