Schizophrenia (Greek for “to split” is a mental disorder characterized by the inability to think rationally, experience normal emotional responses, behave normally and differentiate between reality and fantasy. The disorder is most commonly manifested as auditory hallucinations (hearing voices, noises), paranoid or fantastical delusions and/or disorganized speech and thinking patterns with significant social and occupational dysfunction. The onset of schizophrenia usually begins in late adolescence, and can take anywhere from several months to a few years to develop. The disorder gradually progresses to psychotic symptoms, which can include:

An appearance or mood that shows no emotion (flat affect);
Bizarre motor behavior in which there is less reaction to the environment (catatonic behavior);
False beliefs or thoughts that have nothing to do with reality (delusions); and
Hearing, seeing, or feeling things that are not there (hallucinations).

Interesting, scientists have recently discovered a potential link between schizophrenia and natural selection. After analyzing human DNA from several populations around the world and examining primate genomes dating back to the shared ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, researchers discovered that several gene variants linked to schizophrenia were actually positively selected and remained largely unchanged over time, suggesting that there was some advantage to having them.

British psychiatrist Tim Crow has even argue that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary “price” that human beings pay for our advanced left brain hemisphere specialization for language. He argues that since psychosis is linked to greater levels of right brain hemisphere stimulation and a lessening in left brain hemisphere dominance, our language skills may have evolved at the cost of triggering schizophrenia when the process breaks down. If this is true it is a small price to pay, considering that the disorder only afflicts one percent of the population.

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