About a year and a half ago, I linked to an article in Science Daily about how it appears that creative people have less "latent inhibition" than the normal person. This enables creative sorts to continually re-evaluate new data for patterns and information. It also appears that schizophrenics (who are disproportionately intelligent and creative) completely lose latent inhibition as the schizophrenic breakdown happens. No surprise: the senses turn traitor for a schizophrenic.
I'm reading J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan A. Leonard, Out Of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing Group, 2001) at the moment. It's a call to refound psychiatry based on the emerging biochemical brain research, away from the failure of psychoanalysis. They make an interesting point that fits into the latent inhibition issue, and that is that our senses are rather more narrow than we sometimes assume. For example, while your eyes see a very wide angle, there's really only good detail in a pretty narrow range of a few degrees. Try to read the sentences of a book anywhere but immediately where your eyes are pointed, and you will see this.
A likely reason for most of these limitations is that the brain had to evolve with its receiving capacity and processing capacity more or less in step. If the brain received more information that it could use, this would have no immediate survival value and might prove detrimental. Put it more strongly, many of the severe restrictions on what the human brain receives may well have survival value, because instead of prompting the brain treat lots of incoming information superficially, they position to perform incredibly elaborate analyses on a relatively small incoming flow of data.If you think about this for a few seconds, you can see why a person of normal intelligence needs filters (such as latent inhibition) to keep their miserable little 386-like processors from being overwhelmed, while very intelligent people, who have brains more like an Intel Duo Core processor, can handle more data without crashing. But while there's a difference between having the equivalent of a 100 megabit Ethernet connection into your brain, and a gigabit Ethernet connection--a terabit connection might crash even the smartest of brains.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had visited the little coastal village where my mother and brother now live. It's a small town, and from going out walking with my brother, I think it's a good place for him, for the same reason that small towns are generally good places for those suffering from mental illness. Watching his interactions with townspeople, it was apparent that many of them could tell that something isn't quite right with Ron--but they know him well enough that they didn't seem to be afraid. I also saw a lot of kindness, of the sort that you would expect in a small town, where people can see that someone has something not quite right.
In a big city, you don't get to know someone well enough to figure this out. Once you have identified a stranger as mentally ill, you have just enough information to be concerned, but you are unlikely to have enough interactions with that person to develop confidence that you know whether this person is likely a threat or not.
At least some of the people I saw interacting with Ron, because of some of the odd things he says, acted like they were assuming that he was retarded. But he notices things that I don't. We were walking down the street, and he pointed to an oddly shaped metal plate in the sidewalk, at the corner. He asked me if I knew what they were. I wasn't sure, and guessed that they were some sort of manhole cover of an unusual design. He grinned and said they were for blind people, to tell them when they had reached the street. Sure enough: "Braille for the feet."
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