r/interesting • u/RgCrunchyCo • 23h ago
Mysterious The Mystery of Why There Hasn't Been a Confirmed Case of Schizophrenia in People Born Blind
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-mystery-of-why-there-hasn-t-been-a-confirmed-case-of-schizophrenia-in-people-born-blind-49361It’s not something I’d ever considered but I did indeed find this interesting.
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 20h ago
Neuroscientist here. In short, Schizophrenia is characterized by numerous anomalies of the visual system from the retina to complex stimuli integration. Studies in genome wide association show severals genes common for developping schizophrenia and neurogenesis of the visual system and being born blind pushes your brain to develop other regions that are known to be protective against Schizoprenia.
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u/mirrrje 18h ago
I thought auditory hallucinations were another aspect of schizophrenia. Like it could be auditory or visual?
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u/Riptide360 16h ago
I love how brain scientists are probing these mysteries. Recently learned that tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is not an auditory issue, but a brain processing issue. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could find effective ways of treating schizophrenia and tinnitus!
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u/KeaAware 13h ago
"... tinnitus is not an auditory issue"
Not strictly true - there's a condition called objective tinnitus where the tinnitus noise the patient hears can also be heard by other people! https://www.healthline.com/health/objective-tinnitus
(But it's pretty rare.)
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u/Dizzy_Database_119 13h ago
Take a look at visual snow syndrome, it's basically tinnitus but visual
Sadly neither have reliable solutions
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u/Erroneously_Anointed 9h ago
Glasses with FL-41 lenses can help by filtering out blues and greens, but there's no treatment. I miss how a blue sky looked.
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u/starryswim 8h ago
Ugh, I have it and it’s so annoying. You know how hard it is to find a spider running on carpet? Now imagine the carpet is moving at the same time 😔 I tell people it’s like the static from a film camera when you watch a movie in theaters. But I always see that static overlay
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u/Mobile_Crates 16h ago
Yes I thought that at first reading the title. Read through the article too but the reply here explains it better imo. Essentially it says two things.
First, we know that people have genes that cause certain physical manifestations. Sometimes these genes only get activated if you "exercise" their domain. Research on genes writ large has suggested that some genes that activate based on "exercising" our visual capabilities to help our brains to see visually, also might express (trigger) some effects that lead or link to the development of schizophrenia.
Second, we know that actually there's a few different ways that exercise interacts with our bodies, and it's the regular conception of exercise that comes up next. It turns out that being born blind leads to different parts of the brain getting "stronger" (in generally the same way that a muscle gets stronger after working out) compared to the areas that someone born with sight would have their brain develop in "strength". Research suggests that the areas that get "stronger" (in relative terms) in the brain a blind-born individual (compared to a sight-born individual) help to protect against the effects of schizophrenia.
It's been a while since I summarized science and also I'm eepy so I hope my terminology is all good, corrections are welcomed and encouraged
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u/Binksyboo 9h ago
This one will blow your mind, schizophrenic people who are deaf will actually see hands making sign language words!
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u/mirrrje 7h ago
Wait I remember reading that before. That’s so wild! What a rough condition to have. I feel like I’ve also read that people from different cultures experience schizophrenia differently as well. Like people from like Buddhist countries hear and see things but they aren’t as tormented w like demonic images and sayings as people fron like Christian religions where there’s more of a belief in heaven and hell. Idk how true that is. I suppose I should probably just look it up before saying something like that that could be totally wrong. But im pretty sure I heard something along those lines before
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u/HYDROMORPHONE_ZONE 2h ago
I've heard that as well. People with schizophrenia who are in other countries that have a different upbringing can experience hallucinations where it's usually family that's being nice and saying pleasant things
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u/Asterose 17h ago
Auditory hallucinating is more common than visual, and hallucinations in other senses are also possible, but a Schizophrenia diagnosis does not require hallucinations. There's multiple other diagnoses that can have hallucinations as well.
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 5h ago
Yep hallucinations are veeeeeery common symptom in psychiatric and neurological disorders, even in ophtalmology
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 5h ago
Nope it's both but the very early manifestation are preferentially visual but not always, it's complicated
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u/Spirit_2901 19h ago
So based on this , has the reverse been tested?
Has a schizophrenic patient been deprived of vision to a point where they seem normal. Sounds inhumane though. Perhaps through certain stimulation or deprivation of we unlock certain parts of the psyche?
Think of a sensory deprivation tank.....
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u/pinkTurtleTickler 18h ago edited 8h ago
That was a layman's breakdown. This "protection" is only for people born blind due to brain cortex issues; they never had the ability to develop a visual mental map, so no contradicting realities ever enter their visual region for processing. This doesn't apply with peripherial blindness or to those who lost sight later in life.
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u/VonGibbons 16h ago
Sounds like the genes would have already 'activated', it would be too late for sight deprivation to work
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u/No_Cupcake7037 18h ago
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It would be wild if sensory deprivation of specific senses could retract other mental illnesses also.
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u/Asterose 18h ago
Nope, it's the mere fact that the visual cortex developed at all. So a sighted person with schizophrenia would not be cured by going blind due to natural causes, let alone by covering their eyes for a while. Depriving sight takes away so many activities sighted people are used to doing that it would be very unpopular with patients. We already struggle to have patients that have chronic mental illnesses recognize that they need to stay on their medications, that the entire reason they're thinking clearly and feeling better is because they medications are in their system! For many chronic mental illnesses going off of them means relapsing, but for many people it takes a long while to get enough experience and insight to recognize that. Then they also still need to not want to go back to their symptoms enough to stay on their medications.
I'm on several medications for life and happy for it! They made a big difference that therapy alone wasn't able to do. The brain is an organ, and like any organ it can start malfunctioning and you need medication to get it back to working right.
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u/thereforeratio 11h ago
I feel like this is too definitive a response
The neuroplasticity of the brain and epigenetic changes resulting from experience and stimuli present a pretty expansive canvas for experimentation and study
A blanket “nope” isn’t a scientific conclusion to draw. It should be the basis for a range of hypotheses to be tested
Sensory deprivation, or specifically, extended sight deprivation combined with therapeutic protocols could produce changes in how hallucinations and other symptoms manifest, their intensity, frequency, and could even result in lasting changes, or sense-memory tools for sufferers to reach for
If a week of deprivation while medicated and monitored, could have lasting results, a meaningful subset of patients would be willing to undergo such a treatment, but I will grant, it is extreme from an experimental perspective, and may have other related concerns that could negatively interact with symptoms
An outright cure for schizophrenia is an extreme outcome, but there’s plenty of space for investigating how these brain regions respond to practice
Of course, the material I’d have to look at first would be regarding schizophrenic patients who later become blind, and how their symptoms change
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u/Asterose 10h ago
I have been discussing this at a basic and simplified level, you brought in quite a great amount of nuance and deeper questions! I don't have the answers for these since I'm not in the neurology or research parts of psychology. It is absolutely true that more potential ways to treat a condition is great!
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u/Actual_Duck_1215 15h ago
Sensory deprivation will send a schizophrenic into psychosis.
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 5h ago
Definitly Sensory deprivation CAUSE hallucinations, it's a well-known torture strategy. Remember the photos from Guantanamo
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u/shortmumof2 18h ago
Hmm, would there be a way to encourage development of the regions known to be protective against schizophrenia to either protect against it if it runs in the family or help reduce the severity of one currently has it? Just a thought
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u/Mobile_Crates 16h ago
Extremely rudimentary idea, but one could do blindfolded exercises or learn braille maybe. Developing proprioception &a concrete 'physical sense of self' might also help. The brain lives and dies from neurological connection, and the earlier the better. Hopefully there comes more research on neuroplasticity
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u/Born-Selection88 14h ago
No, no it's not. Maybe in neurology it's a real thing, but in psych it's "She doesn't like you, so you have no rights." There are no visual systems tests. Lol
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u/transferingtoearth 9h ago
If someone is from a family prone to it or starts having symptoms why don't they blind fold them to cure them , then?
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u/BGRedhead 16h ago
OK, this is an honest question since you’re a neuroscientist… I figure you might know. What about those of us that had a traumatic event that caused us to lose our eyesight later in life? Like I had severe trauma that damaged my cornea and left him severely scarred…. I have basically 6/600 vision…. Would that play into this or not? I can’t read the whole article for obvious reasons, but I know there could still be auditory hallucinations but this would interfere with visual hallucinations Would it not?
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 5h ago
It's more complexe than that, I told you in my first post maybe 1% of the way to develop or not this disorder
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u/easterss 15h ago
What does it mean to develop Other areas known to be protective of schizophrenia? Is there a way to do this in someone who isn’t blind?
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u/MedullaOblongata_dj 1h ago
Not really, it's not that simple. We're talking about the whole brain developping differently to adapt to blindness. And being born blindness as a "protection" to schizophrenia, is still a theory which is difficult to test because of the difficulty to recruit born blindness participants and follow them during 15-20 years.
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u/FernandoMM1220 18h ago
so theoretically if someone gained sight later in life they could develop visual schizophrenia. interesting.
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u/Unable_Spend8209 22h ago
I mean no questions someone whose born blind and they say “I’m hearing voices from people I don’t see …”
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 10h ago
I know you're joking, but do a blindness experience and you'll be amazed at how quickly you begin to navigate off of hearing and feel, though! Blind people know where people and objects are off of hearing better than us sighted people do, and even people who lost their sight later in life describe it sometimes as seeing the world. They use most of the same tech you and I do, including touchscreen phones.
Hallucinations also aren't required for Schizophrenia. That condition is roughly 1 in 300 and comorbidities are intensely studied, but we still have 0 cases of somebody who's been blind since birth or a very young age being diagnosed with Schizophrenia! Abnormal activity in the visual cortex is part of the condition (which also is not usually processed as anything visual), which of course people born blind never develop.
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u/mentaL8888 18h ago
Yeah, their whole reality is filled with voices they cannot see already.
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Blind people, including those who went blind later in life, often describe how they navigate the world through hearing, touch, and proprioception as seeing. You can pick up so much through feel and hearing. Do a blindness experience and you'll be amazed at how quickly you start navigating and seeing the world with touch, proprioception, and hearing. Hallucinations also aren't required for diagnosing Schizophrenia. It's a 1 in 300 condition and yet we still have 0 cases of anybody born blind/went blind while very young having it!
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u/RocketToad 23h ago
Statistical sample to small?
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u/Obanthered 21h ago
There are about 1.5 million people born blind in the world and roughly 1 in 300 people have schizophrenia, so if these variables were independent there should be about 5000 people blind from birth who are also schizophrenic. That there are 0 known cases is an immense statistical anomaly.
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u/RocketToad 19h ago
Likely the majority of those born blind in the world lack sufficient health care for schizophenia to be even diagnosed
Edit: also, it might be harder to diagnose someone with schizophrenia if they are blind? Just speculating
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Mental health worker here, nope! If you are able to get treatment for having poor to no eyesight, you probably have access to mental healthcare too.
Schizophrenia has many varying symptoms and few people ever have all of them. Visual hallucinations are much less common than auditory ones, and there are other mental illnesses that have auditory and/or visual hallucinations. The reason nobody born blind has been diagnosed with Schizophrenia, despite that disorder being roughly 1 in 300 people, is very striking. Some of the neurological and biological brain activity in people with Schizphrenia involves the visual cortex (which isn't necessarily processed as any visual stimuli), but people blind since birth or from a very young age never develop that part of the brain in the first place. Instead other, potentially protective regions of the brain are developed more.
This video by Dr. Marks is a good one on how we recognize and diagnose Schizphrenia.
Blind people live very normal lives and have a lot more independent capabilities than most people assume. This video has a man who gradually lost his sight answering questions, IMO it was really interesting. While I was living in Hungary I went to the Invisible Exhibition and did the guided walk through a variety of rooms you'd encounter in day to day life, but in pitch black. You're guided by a blind person who works there and at the end they make various drinks at the request of the guests, still in pitch black! Very fascinating experience, highly recommmended! They also had an indoor walking course where you could out on a blindfold and practice walking with a cane. Through all the experiences I was surprised at how quickly I began to adapt!
Bonus fun fact: despite media loving the psychotic crazy villain tropes, people who have serious mental illnesses like Schizophrenia are far more likely to be victims of crime and abuse than perpetrators.
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u/Practical-Cup-4365 13h ago
It is harder to diagnose schizophrenia in people who became blind later in life.
They present with altered delusion themes and different hallucination pattern.1
u/Antique-Way-570 11h ago
Why would that be likely?
I don’t see any plausible correlation between someone being born blind and someone being schizophrenic thay would account for a majority differential.
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u/Cultural-Company282 20h ago
C'mon, Reddit. Don't make me read the article! Someone tell me the answer!
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u/Sewere 20h ago
What article? What are you talking about? Who are you talking to?
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u/Cultural-Company282 20h ago
I'm talking about the Discover Magazine article that's linked to the original post.
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u/isatai-i 20h ago
Formulated a bit edgy:
We all hallucinate the world more than actually see.
Blind people don't do that so their brain is not that prone to hallucinate.
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Nah, Schizophrenic brain function includes unusual activity in the visual cortex, but people born blind/blind from a very young age don't develop that part of the brain at all. Instead other regions are developed more than in sighted people. Blind people are more attuned to their other senses, so they would just be hallucinating the other senses. Blind people live very normal lives and use the same technologies you and I do, including touchscreens.
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u/avenita123 16h ago
So.. since the visual cortex was never activated in people born blind, they don’t develop visual hallucinations. Is that right? because the brain region needed to see is the same one needed for visual hallucinations? (Is that a good ELI5 summary?). But they could still technically develop auditive or olfactory hallucinations
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u/Asterose 13h ago
The article is a good read going into it avtually well worth giving it a look over! I can't really give a 2 sentence summary. I'm in psychology, but not neurobiology specifically!
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u/isatai-i 20h ago
Makes sense to me that seeing people would be more prone to hallucinations because our brain hallucinates sight so much.
We all just imagine something where the blind spot is all the time for example.
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u/Traditional-Meat-549 19h ago edited 18h ago
Interesting information edit: mother in law had visual hallucinations after being diagnosed with macular degeneration. As her vision failed, she became much more emotionally invested in those hallucinations. She never forgot regular life, but wasn't interested in engaging in it.
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u/InfluenceTrue4121 21h ago
This is absolutely fascinating. I know someone who is bipolar 2 with frequent psychosis and hallucinations. She is an absolute expert when it comes to art and combining colors.
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u/parbarostrich 14h ago
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia several years ago. Interestingly enough, I started hearing voices for the first time the day I had lasik eye surgery. I was convinced that my doctor worked for the government and had put some sort of device in my eyes to cause it.
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u/athletic_dominion 20h ago
sense if you think about how much of schizophrenia ties back to visual processing and how the brain builds its sense of reality from what it sees
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Auditory hallucinations are much more common than visual ones though, and hallucinations aren't universal, so it isn't a requirement for diagnosing Schizophrenia. It has more to do with abnormalities in the visual cortex, which people born blind/who went blind while very young of course never develop. People can hallucinate in ther senses too. Schizophrenia is a roughly 1 in 300 condition and it is very unusual that we have 0 people born blind that have been diagnosed with it.
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u/athletic_dominion 16h ago
I was oversimplifying. The visual cortex's role in constructing a coherent reality model might be the missing piece, even without hallucinations.
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u/Winthefuturenow 20h ago
Can’t hallucinate if you can’t see. You’re welcome “scientists”.
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Erm, no, hallucinations are not a requirement for to be diagnosed with Schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations are way more common than visual hallucinations. There's multiple other disorders that can have hallucinations too. People can also hallucinate in other senses. A notable amount of highly unusual brain activity in people dealing with Schizophrenia involves the visual cortex, but people born blind/who went blind while very young never develop that region of the brain in the first place. Schizophrenia is a roughly 1 in 300 condition, but we have 0 cases of anybody born blind with the condition. Comorbidity of disorders and diseases is heavily studied and this total and complete lack of overlap is so statistically unusual it's being studied further.
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u/tesulalu 19h ago
Correct!!!!👍🏿
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Nope. Hallucinations aren't a requirement for a Schizophrenia diagnosis and some people who have Schizophrenia never have any. There's other diagnoses that can have hallucinations too. Auditory hallucinations are also way more common than visual ones, and you can hallucinate in other senses.
A lot of unusual brain activity in Schizophrenia is in the visual cortex, which of course is a brain region people born blind or eho went blind from a young age don't develop. The activity also isn't necessarily processed as visual stimuli.
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u/Dragon_Bidness 19h ago
Huh. Seems like not being able to see would mean your brain forms connections and operates in ways that sighted peoples don't, I'm guessing that's got something to do with it.
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u/Sudden-Relative3 7h ago
Being blind and hearing things that aren’t there must be a whole different level of terrifying.
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u/BigMack6911 18h ago
Cant see an imaginary person if you can't see. Loophole
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
Auditory hallucinations are way more common than visual ones, and you can hallucinate in other senses too! Hallucinations of any kind aren't even a requirement for a Schizophrenia diagnosis, and other conditions have it! Schizophrenic brain activity involves abnormal shenanigans in the visual cortex, but that doesn't mean it translates into visual disturbances. And people who've been blind since birth or a very young age of course never develop the visual cortex at all. Schizophrenia's a 1 in 300 condition and comorbidities with serious medical (including mental) diagnoses is heavily studied, but we have 0 people who were born blind diagnosed with Schizophrenia.
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u/Novel-Firefighter-55 20h ago
When the outside world dominates the inside world, people breakdown
Meditation, closing the eyes, turning off the overwhelming outside stimulus helps.
Blind People aren't being overwhelmed with visual stimulus.
I'm speaking from personal experience and theory, not blind, just a hypothesis.
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u/Reasonable-Aside6660 20h ago
Interesting thought. Thanks for sharing that.
"When the outside world dominates the inside world, people breakdown”
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u/Asterose 17h ago edited 17h ago
While meditation is a great practice for mental health, a lot of serious mental illnesses are your inside world breaking down regardless of what's outside, though. Auditory hallucinations are much more common than visual ones or hallucinations in any other senses, and a Schizophrenia diagnosis doesn't require hallucinations. Interestingly, Schizophrenia involves abnormal activity in the visual cortex, note that doesn't mean the abnormalities will definitely translate into anything visual. People born blind or who went blind very young never develop that region of the brain. Schizophrenia's a 1 in 300 condition but we have 0 cases of anybody who didn't develop the visual cortex who have it!
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 37m ago
How do they know the voices in their head aren't real if they can't see who's there and who's not?
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