Congenitally Blind People Appear to be Protected from Schizophrenia

14/05 18:30 - Congenitally Blind People Appear to be Protected from Schizophrenia
Sometimes clues to a disease come from the people who don't get it. A 1950 study of the psychological lives of blind people revealed that there are no cases of people who had been blind since birth developing schizophrenia. Double-checking through larger health records confirmed the fact. Those who suffer an eye injury or otherwise become blind after seeing in childhood might develop the disease as much as anyone else, but those who were born with a malfunctioning visual cortex in the brain do not. The visual cortex plays a big role in detecting signals from the outside world and sorting them out. The brain spends a lot of energy ranking visual stimuli to calculate which is important and using those signals to make sense of the world. In schizophrenic patients, this ranking seems to go haywire, and the brain cannot ignore random signals. When there is no visual stimuli in the visual cortex, that part of the brain is often repurposed for other tasks. Does this reorganization of brain tasks provide some kind of protection against schizophrenia? The answer may lie in the complex way in which our brains work. Read about this intriguing research at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Database Center for Life Science(DBCLS)) ...