Deaf Schizophrenics

[tongodeon]

Last night I posted a question to deaf:

When a prelingually deaf person - someone who is born deaf and has never known sound as language - becomes schizophrenic... they don't hear voices, do they? If not, what tells them to kill people or run away from the CIA mind control rays? SOMETHING tells them this. Do they hallucinate people signing at them

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I recently heard tell of a man with classic red-green colorblindness who also had synaesthetic hallucinations. Some of these were in colors that he couldn't see in the external world. He had no real verbal apparatus to describe them and called them "Martian colors".

[tongodeon]

http://www.negativland.com/squant/

[usernameguy]

(I'd put this on the other thread but it's kinda tangental)

I've read two interesting theories as to causes of mental disease lately:
- Someone said that one of the root causes of schizophrenia is the lack the ability to filter incoming stimuli. That is, schizophrenics can't zone out. They process all incoming sensory inputs, all the time. Eventually their brains can't disseminate all of it anymore. They get overloaded.
- Similiarly, someone (may have been the same article) was arguing that depressives simply look at everything exactly as it is. They can't fool themselves that things turned out well, when they didn't. For example, depressives correctly figure out that a machine giving them candy doesn't actual respond in any way to their button pushes. It's just random. Normal people fool themselves into thinking they catch on to "the pattern" of button presses.

[tongodeon]

The "depressives" article reminds me of something I said when I was younger. My mom thought I was depressed and wanted to put me on antidepressants. I said "I'm depressed I've realized that a large part of the world is crap. If I take antidepressants the world will still be crap, and I'll be on drugs. That's not solving the problem."

[omarius]

Thunk! Goes a quote in the quotes file.

[mmcirvin]

I know the studies you're talking about, which seem to have objectively proved that everything is shit, but I have seen and talked to people having major depressive episodes and I don't buy this at all. They believe that every action is worthless, they are personally worthless, nothing they do will ever succeed, they are stupid and ugly and boring, everyone hates them and no pleasure or contentment is possible under any circumstances. This isn't the world as it is, it's a vision of the world run by a sadist demiurge.

I've been fortunate enough not to experience anything that intense, but I've written before about how, when I'm feeling down, I easily fall into a kind of negative faith: to use the example of the random candy machine, I'd encounter a run of four or five no-candy button presses in a row and too easily conclude that the machine has stopped giving candy forever, when in fact it's still random. This kind of reasoning is as tainted as trying to find the system.

[sambushell]

Do you always think using a communication language? I certainly don't normally plan, or think technically, in English -- words become involved if I'm communicating or imagining communicating.

I'm not sure we're very well equipped with terminology for these distinctions: if you ask me what I'm thinking I'll have to turn it into words in order to express it, which conceals from you whether I was thinking in words or not. Conversely, "hearing voices" might be the best way to describe perceiving thoughts as coming from an external source, even though they may not be perceived as being injected in the form of a communication language.

Could a schizophrenic hear a voice telling him something that he does not know (or cannot remember) the words for?

[tongodeon]

Do you always think using a communication language? I certainly don't normally plan, or think technically, in English

When I'm planning how to write a shader I'll think in SL. When I'm planning how to write a script I'll think in Python. But those are still languages.

I'm wondering if a very talented C++ programmer who became scizophrenic would start having delusions of parse errors and undeclared variables being typed at him by unseen hands.

[occlupanid]

My favorite phrase of the day: "Ill-Defined Cortical Area"