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Scientists Afflict Computers With Schizophrenia
An anonymous reader writes "Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University. In their experiments, the scientists used a virtual neural network to simulate an excessive release of dopamine in the brain and found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters."
Do schizophrenics typically have eidetic memories? This is not a symptom I was aware of.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't quite have schizophrenia, but I do tend to remember a lot and overthink things. Spending time disconnected from digital stimulus (for example, going for a decent walk every day, without bringing your phone) helps give your brain time to process everything.
I'd think the effect of staying always connected is even worse for schizophrenics if this study is correct.
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator! Only took something like a week :p
which is totally what she said
"which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would."
So the fact that it sometimes takes me twenty minutes to find my keys in the morning is a sign that I'm sane? That's oddly comforting.
Just tell the Schizophrenics the hop count of their crazy idea is 16. Yet another problem solved with poison reverse.
Artificial human intelligence at last!!!
very good info. make the analogy of schizophrenia with a computer network
Maybe: /tmp
% rm
I"m sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
"In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing."
Interesting methodology. I doubt though that it has a relationship to real schizo.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Cool so installing Windows makes one a Scientist
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Sometimes I wonder how people develop their hypotheses. In this case, I'm wonder whether one of the researchers may have been struck by Morrison's Joker in the Batman Comic Arkham Asylum - in which a researcher describes the joker as hyper-sane, unable to filter out stimulus from the world around. Hmm.
So these "Scientists" think the problem with "schizophrenic" people is they can't forget enough eh? I think the problem is what we CAN remember that no one else can. What's next? You're going to start wiping our memories for us? You already TRIED THAT!!!! IT DIDN'T WORK DID IT?!?! If you think I'm getting on that damned ship again and going to the pyramid, you're wrong. Johns told me about your plan and I'm on to you! The four corner day will supplant your illusion of euclidean time. ALL HAIL THE TIME CUBE!!!!! http://www.timecube.com/
It's called installing Windows Me.
Actually windows 95 and 98 were not much better....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK I'll go read TFA now.
... I'm afraid I can't help you with your research on schizophrenia....
sigfault (core dumped)
It's really quite excellent -- and vaguely linked to his Cryptonomicon universe...
http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html
Uh, the fortune cookie generator exploded on me.
Meanwhile, Hi Mods. this is On Topic because this is what TFA says being schizophrenic and unable to forget is like!
Here we go!
--
Try the Moo Shu Pork. It is especially good today. % Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. % Try to have as good a life as you can under the circumstances. % Try to relax and enjoy the crisis. -- Ashleigh Brilliant % Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you. % Tuesday After Lunch is the cosmic time of the week. % Tuesday is the Wednesday of the rest of your life. % What happened last night can happen again. % While you recently had your problems on the run, they've regrouped and are making another attack. % Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply. % You are a bundle of energy, always on the go. % You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here. % You are a very redundant person, that's what kind of person you are. % You are always busy. % You are as I am with You. % You are capable of planning your future. % You are confused; but this is your normal state. % You are deeply attached to your friends and acquaintances. % You are destined to become the commandant of the fighting men of the department of transportation. % You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend. % You are fairminded, just and loving. % You are farsighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend. % You are fighting for survival in your own sweet and gentle way. % You are going to have a new love affair. % You are magnetic in your bearing. % You are not dead yet. But watch for further reports. % You are number 6! Who is number one? % You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. % You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends. % You are sick, twisted and perverted. I like that in a person. % You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep. % You are standing on my toes. % You are taking yourself far too seriously. % You are the only person to ever get this message. % You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of trash. % You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity. % You can create your own opportunities this week. Blackmail a senior executive. % You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with dirt is concerned. % You can rent this space for only $5 a week. % You could live a better life, if you had a better mind and a better body. % You definitely intend to start living sometime soon. % You dialed 5483. % You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. % You don't become a failure until you're satisfied with being one. % You enjoy the company of other people. % You feel a whole lot more like you do now than you did when you used to. % You fill a much-needed gap. % You get along very well with everyone except animals and people. % You had some happiness once, but your parents moved away, and you had to leave it behind. % You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music. % You have a deep interest in all that is artistic. % You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved. % You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex. % You have a strong appeal for members of your own sex. % You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first. % You have a truly strong individuality. % You have a will that can be influenced by all with whom you come in contact. % You have an ability to sense and know higher truth. % You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself. % You have an unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly. % You have an unusual magnetic personality. Don't walk too close to metal objects which are not fastened down. % You have an unusual understanding of the problems of human relationships. % You have been selected for a secret mission. % You have Egyptian flu: you're going to be a
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I find the summary a bit confusing, though. What I have heard before is that the schizophrenic brain is poor at filtering out stimuli, meaning that unimportant details will stand out as much as important ones. For instance, it might have trouble filtering out ambient noise, so whereas a normal brain will cut off processing early on, a schizophrenic brain will process the noise the same way it would process salient, meaningful sounds. So what might happen is that the phoneme processing part of the brain will receive ambient noise as input and will make out voices and whispers out of it, because that is its job, and then these will be manipulated and interpreted as a conversation - maybe neighbors plotting against you, because why else would you be paying attention?
Stimuli that should never make it past saliency processing get dispatched to the brain, which assumes that if it got this far, it must be meaningful (this is normally a fair assumption). From then on, it will "learn" to find meaning in noise, hence visual or auditive hallucinations, delusions, etc. From what I can gather, this study shows that an excess of dopamine could inhibit normal filtering functions, hence the "hyperlearning" on stimuli that should be thrown out, but isn't.
Did Slashdot's fortune thing at the bottom of the page just totally wig out?
I don't think that they're saying that episodic memory improves from hyper-learning. A 'normal' brain throws out most of the information it receives in the process of highlighting the important, useful information that's incident on the brain's circuitry. Because of this ability, the brain is able to create a coherent narrative for itself.
The scientists are saying that, in schizophrenic brains, what ends up being remembered is not this useful information. Instead, the wrong information is selected by the neural circuits such that the wrong information ends up encoded in long-term memory. This information is selected as being just as important, or even more important, in the episodic 'story' than practical information, such as, for example, the reminders that you point out they forget. The end result is that the long-term memories end up being incoherent.
So it's an issue of hyper-learning everything, not just what's important. If it was simply increased salience for what was important, that would be usefully improved memory. Also, while the symptoms of schizophrenia that you point out are correct, those are the outward psychological symptoms. These scientists are exploring what happens neurologically, at the level of individual neurons.
Yes, I know it's not THE opposite, but that's what it sounds like to me.
BTW, what's with the 5000 fortune cookies showing up in the footer of slashdot?!?
I8-D
One more reason to be wary of any organization excessively collecting data. One day they will become schizophrenic, if they aren't already.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I've never understood how schizophrenia got equated with having multiple personalities. I've known many schizophrenics because schizophrenia runs in my family and not a single one of them has multiple personalities.
What's next, computers with dementia? Wait, computer virus has already turned computers into Alzheimer patients... :P
Why not. If you can perfectly replicate the problem, you now have a better understanding of what the problem is, and a way to test for possible solutions.
The Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia result in Apathy, Lack of Motivation, and General Disorganized Thinking. Those patients I know who have this illness DON'T remember many things. In fact, they require regular "reminders" of the things that they ought to remember. I think this Notion that people who have this Illness "never forget" is not founded in fact. There is no evidence to support this hypothesis or notion.
That needn't be a contradiction. It could be just the same as in the physical world: The more stuff you keep, the harder it gets to find the stuff you want. If there's nothing else on your table, the paper saying "don't forget to buy a birthday present for $SOMEONE" will stand out, and every time you look at the table, you'll be reminded of this. OTOH, if the table is full of different papers, you'll likely not notice that one with the important reminder on it. It's almost as if it weren't there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The problem with schizo people is not that they have too many "normal" memories. But that they remember too much of the "wrong" things.
Have you ever woken up from a dream, and had difficulty, at least for a few moments, figuring out what is real and what is not? After those few moments, your mind clears, and you realize that your dream made no sense at all, and you wonder how you could have ever thought it was real. By the time you finish breakfast, the dream is forgotten.
This is what schizophrenia is like. Except your mind doesn't clear, you don't forget, and you don't stop dreaming when you wake up. I think the cure to schizophrenia will come when we find the brain's "time to wake up" switch, and figure out why it doesn't always work.
Schizophrenia is a chronic physical (brain) illness, due to brain (nature/nurture) structure and/or chemistry.
To compare schizophrenia a human malady to fycked-up technology application is sick. Texas universities probably have creationist classes and students believing amazon, sony, and pc/tablet crash, because it is godddd's will. As always, "Reality is self-induced hallucination."
If a university wants to model a schizophrenic state using technology after we have proof of the physical causes, then there is some research value.
Schizophrenia is a physical illness just like kidney stones, cancer, flu.... The insurance companies are happy to call it a mental illness to avoid providing lifetime coverage of a transient or chronic physical condition.
IMO: I am not a MHP/researcher, about one in three people have transient schizophrenic states (many politicians, C*Os, clerics) that allow them to excel at social skills and fail often with moral/ethic situations [they can always blame someone or godddd].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Your joking is bigotted and ignorant.
...
Schizoprenia and multiple personality *slash* dissociative identity disorder are two completely different things.
I realize, of course, that you didn't write the joke, but you did repeat it.
This is how is should read:
Roses are Red...
Violets are Blue
I'm schizophrenic...
And I wish that duck outside my window would quit reading my mind . . .
Do these "many schizophrenics" have names? Do you have photos of them?
Could it be possible they are all you?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Ok. Well, I wasn't going to say this, but it's not just people I know. I have a brain disease, myself. It's not schizophrenia or being eidetic but it's very much a perceptual/memory problem.
I would not consider it a gift. I'm not by any means arguing on behalf of discriminating against the neurologically ill. What I am for is recognizing that these illnesses do have a negative impact on quality of life (though this is not to say for everyone, but I do speak for myself in this regard.)
You do realize that the psychiatric grouping of deseases called "schizophrenia" include many different physical illnesses that may be completely unrelated, right?
You realize that negative symptom form and positive symptom form of schizophrenia can be completely different in their underlying physical causes and are only the same desease in the minds of the psychiatrist/psychologist? You realize that the old person with an atrophied brain and a young person with a chemical imbalance show different symptoms of schizophrenia because they don't have the same desease? One has negative symptoms because he is missing large portions of brain tissue and the other has positive symptoms because his intact brain is not working correctly. Both are called "schizophrenia" even though they are different illnesses.
You do realize we are still in a dark age when it comes to psychiatry, right?
You do? Good. I was just checking.
wait, am I the parent poster? are you using the royal we? or are you talking about the person I'm responding to?
Neither I nor my parent claimed to have a brain disease, though he claimed to know someone who did, so I assume you're talking to him. Also, you're very hard to read, which is hurting your claim to superior debate skills. Comprehension is important in debates.
I think we all argue with ourself/talk to people who aren't really there. It's something that society tends to associate with mental illness but really, it's just internal dialogue/daydreams which some of us happen to do out loud without realizing it. And it's hardly a scam, my uncle was schizophrenic and left to his own devices he went missing for years and wandered the streets until he lost a leg to frostbite. That's how I first saw him when I was a child. On a hospital bed, with a bandaged stump, barely able to string a sentence together. My grandmother had it too, refused to leave the house for the last 10 years of her life. She was apparently afraid of what was out there, thought there were men out to get her. I think the percentage of Schizophrenics who could function in society is very low.
Either paranoia or disordered thought gets most of them in the end.
Let me add: the brain is so complex that it's not really amenable to generalizations. Therefore, I was mistaken in generalizing or seeming to speak for others, and I apologize.
It sounds like too much remembering induces positive feedback in the brain's pathways which lead to unstable oscillations. Forgetting is then required in order to dampen the system and stabilize it.
If the brain remembers too much, it's possibly not the new stimuli which overwhelm it, but the combination of new stimuli plus the remembered information being replayed, all made worse by feedback paths.
Just a wild-assed hypothesis.
I don't think they are necessarily writing about large-scale organized memory, like learning.
But perhaps small-scale memories in groups of brain cells?
For instance, suppose you hear a bell ring briefly, but then after it stops, you continue to hear an intense memory of it in your head as a kind of after image, which mixes in with new sounds that you are hearing.
The result is chaos.
I posted the following comment on neuroskeptic about this article:
`"Noteworthy was the high frequency of agent-slotting exchanges between the hospital boss, Joe, and the Mafia boss, Vito, and parallel confusions between the “I” self-reference and underling Mafia members, suggesting generalization of boss/underling relationships."
For the model to recognize these types of relationships, the authors would have had to explicitly tag these agents as possessing either these qualities the constituent elements of these qualities. In either case, it's easy to imagine post-hoc biases in the model's "memory encoder" that generate just-so results without actually reflecting the biological or theoretical underpinnings.
How these relationships are assessed by the "memory encoder" and the "story parser" has much to do with the way features are associated with lexemes. From http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?miikkulainen:phd:
"Processing in DISCERN is based on hierarchically-organized backpropagation modules, communicating through a central lexicon of word representations. The lexicon is a double feature map, which transforms the orthographic word symbol into its semantic representation and vice versa."`
(http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/04/schizophrenic-computer.html)
A judgement of this article depends largely on whether the parser assigns meaning with a result (at the very least, or, given that the goal is to model schizophrenia, in a way) that's compatible with the output (or processes) of human linguistic cognition.
Geez, lighten up Francis...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And I do not have multiple-personalities. I'm lucky I have medicine that let's me lead a half-way normal life. I "remember" being sick, as much as you can remember without being certain that any of what you perceived had a basis in "Reality." When I was sick there were no "voices" in my mind, rather, it was an experience that is consistent with this article. Facts. Connecting together in rapid fashion to other "facts" whether the basis that connected them was logical or not. At first, without medicine, connecting the "facts" leads to some novel interpretations that others around you might find interesting. However, as time and the disease progresses without treatment: an overwhelming web of "facts" emerges and the frequency of different interpretations of the same "facts" doubles until fully untreated I was in a full state of chaos, or as it is really called: psychosis. Stay in and be happy you have a concrete "reality" you do not have cause to question.
Shh.
This paper shows why psychologists should not touch computers, let alone write papers about it. Hyperlearning may be a cause of schizophrenia in people, but this paper shows nothing of the sort. The learning rate in artificial neural nets determines a step size for the optimisation of a function. You need small steps because at each step the learning algorithm (gradient descent, or error backpropagation in this case) assumes that the function is linear. So neurons in the human brain assume piecewise linear behaviour in their neighbours? Of course not. The authors are just clueless about the mathematical model that they use.
And similar things can be said for Bipoler Disorder(s). I've often described psychiatry as a quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific cult that believes in drugs. Big Pharma knows it is in their interest to maintain that situation. Arguing with a psychiatrist can often seem like trying to debate evolution with a hardcore creationist.
John_Chalisque
In the many decades that psychiatry has been around, there is insufficient evidence of this: brain changes are caused by the drugs, not the condition. The mind body problem has plagued philosophy for many years and the materialist reductionist way of explaining it away as just brain chemistry is far from proven. Until we can answer that, we cannot hope to seriously try to pin down mental health issues as brain diseases or perhaps something else. We may never truly understand since the complexity of the overall behaviour of the brain is still well beyond what we can deal with.
John_Chalisque
Does this mean that people with photographic memories are more likely to develop schizophrenia?
it's called... scratches head.... dissasociative personality disorder. it's a coping mechanism that the body goes into after experiencing trauma.
They give people dissassociative anesthetics to help them get over those kind of 'nagging' problems, well sometimes.... other's just buy them on the street corner.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
but there is good evidence to support that the medication make you stupid and ignorant. (until 20 years later when your brain has adapted, if you hack it that long [e.g. manage to buy enough coke, speed,smack and booze to make it ok)...
I remembered crying as a baby the other day (the actual crying, my brain was confused and distressed but I worked it out in the end and got over it... good job I can learn my way over it)... still got a tad of chronic pain left, but I think a few transformers, a 9v battery and some back EMF should teach me that pain isn't a sensible emotional response.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Isn't this kind of what drove HAL crazy?
The mind body problem has plagued philosophy for many years
Actually, philosophy has proven that there is no mind-body-problem. The mind is not separate from the body, and not even actually a thing. It is rather a process that happens in a body.
What these scientists did is model parts of how the brain works with a computer, then modify its workings in accordance to a hypothesis about schizophrenia, and got the results the hypothesis predicts. You can't do these kinds of experiments on live humans for ethical reasons. Saying they made a computer schizophrenic is a misleading summary.
I/O Logic for "hyperlearning" "learning" to occur there are two requirements acquisition and application.
IOW: Acquisition of knowledge/experience with no skills to apply knowledge/experience cannot be learning. All learning requires test/eval application of the knowledge/experience acquired. Learning can be theoretical/abstract/art... and/or applied/practical/task... and provide value to at least the learner.
So, "hyperlearning" does not exist for persons in a fugue/schizophrenic state. They cannot apply acquired knowledge/experience and are not expected to apply knowledge/experience. A surgeon/engineer that has amnesia and/or schizophrenia cannot appropriately apply the acquired knowledge/experience.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I will never be sure that my brain can be physically distinguish from the schizophrenic brain without a return to the early dark-ages (0001ce...2011ce) of mental health.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Ontologically a body-problem that is an irrational dogmatic problem.
"The dogma affected will never reason effective." One in three godmatics significantly weights in favor of poor (possibly insane) policy/decisions....
I am never sure, I reason effective, but avoiding dogma (political/cultural...) helps my reasoning confidence.
Thanks
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You are correct. The term "schizophrenia" means "split mind," and it is probably that misnomer that causes the confusion.
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which both refer to the same thing, is in every case I am aware of caused by a severely traumatic experience. It is a completely different phenomenon and an utterly fascinating one from both a psychological and physiological perspective. There are changes in the body that are very difficult to explain with conventional theories of how mind affects body--from mildly interesting ones like differing allergies to the startling changes in visual acuity as seen here.
Your brain is not a computer.
No, only eight, of which I am one. I know because I hyperlearned it.
Your brain is not a computer.