Based Camp - July 04, 2024


Autism vs Schizophrenia： Opposite Ends of the Spectrum？ What Causes Them？


Episode Stats

Length

34 minutes

Words per Minute

198.3529

Word Count

6,792

Sentence Count

475

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary

In this episode, we discuss schizophrenia, autism, and schizoidism. What are the differences between schizophrenia and autism and how do they affect our understanding of how humans think and how they interact with each other? We also talk about how schizophrenia affects the way we think about the world and how we interact with other people.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 So what I think is happening with schizophrenic individuals is that their theory of mind is
00:00:05.660 basically hyper-stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.
00:00:10.100 And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations.
00:00:13.440 This happens when you see something like, you know, applying a theory of mind to the
00:00:18.800 way things are arranged in a store window, applying a theory of mind to like world events,
00:00:24.680 right?
00:00:24.900 Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's directly relevant to you or a theory
00:00:28.460 of mind creating a hallucination.
00:00:30.480 Catatonia is the one counter example here.
00:00:33.020 But what I suspect is really happening with catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with
00:00:36.900 so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.
00:00:40.320 They're paralyzed by their thoughts.
00:00:42.100 Yeah, that makes sense to me.
00:00:43.880 So autism, I think, is literally defined by the exact opposite.
00:00:47.220 I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people.
00:00:54.440 And this is what creates problems in autism.
00:00:56.460 Would you like to know more?
00:00:57.500 Well, hello, gorgeous.
00:00:59.240 I am poking around the comments in our videos a while ago.
00:01:04.020 And I remember some people speculating on like what we sort of meant about like the autistic
00:01:10.780 and schizoid spectrums.
00:01:12.560 And they implied that we were talking about something more cultural and not actually like
00:01:18.040 autistic or schizoid.
00:01:19.480 And that is not true.
00:01:20.640 So we should probably dig into what we're talking about more here when we're talking about people
00:01:26.300 being on the autistic spectrum or being on a schizoid spectrum, because they're very different
00:01:31.160 things.
00:01:32.380 I should point out, this is not a cultural thing.
00:01:35.780 This is shown in genetic data.
00:01:37.460 This is shown in diagnostic data.
00:01:39.140 And we should probably establish our credentials here.
00:01:42.060 I started one of my first jobs.
00:01:44.240 I mean, I did.
00:01:44.820 I have a few like origin jobs, right?
00:01:47.060 Because I took a number of early jobs in various neuroscience fields.
00:01:50.240 The three origin jobs was one was studying the evolution of human cognition and humanity
00:01:55.260 at the Smithsonian.
00:01:56.760 And in creating an exhibit, the human origins display, I worked on that.
00:01:59.740 So some of the stuff I created is still on display at the Smithsonian.
00:02:02.540 So that's one area.
00:02:03.900 Another area is my brain computer interface work.
00:02:05.780 So this was working on technology that allowed humans to control machines with their thoughts,
00:02:09.860 similar to Neuralink.
00:02:10.880 The final area and the area I worked by far the longest in was schizophrenia research.
00:02:16.700 So this was understanding how this is specifically what I was looking at was going through lots of
00:02:23.020 patients and making sure that they were properly categorized.
00:02:25.380 So this involved tons and tons of interviews.
00:02:27.320 I had to interview hundreds of people about their deepest – and keep in mind,
00:02:31.500 not just schizophrenia patients, but also normal people – about their deepest thoughts
00:02:35.720 about the world, their lives, their daily routines, everything like that.
00:02:39.740 Because people were like, wait, why were you doing normal people?
00:02:42.340 It's because I wasn't working as a clinician.
00:02:44.300 I was working as a researcher.
00:02:46.100 And so we needed a control group.
00:02:47.660 And we needed a control group that was similar in economic status to our schizophrenia population.
00:02:53.260 Now, schizophrenia population is typically not doing very well in society.
00:02:56.180 This is lower income, lower middle income group.
00:03:00.100 And so I really got to get a personal, like really in-your-face, really high-volume understanding
00:03:08.900 of this section of humanity and the way they think and engage with the world,
00:03:13.940 both people within the schizophrenia population and not schizophrenia population.
00:03:17.300 And I had to be really good.
00:03:18.620 Like I had memorized the DSM at one point.
00:03:21.640 People who don't know things, not just the schizophrenic diagnostic criteria.
00:03:26.020 The whole thing.
00:03:27.180 I could give you any – not memorize word per word, but I could give you any diagnosis in it
00:03:33.040 with its broad, like specific diagnostic criteria.
00:03:36.120 Now, it's been a long time since then, but I took a lot of pride on this at one point.
00:03:39.480 People who don't know – I might put a picture of a DSM on the screen because people who don't know
00:03:43.520 what the DSM is might be hearing that, oh, he memorized the diagnostic standard criteria.
00:03:48.820 He – well, what is that?
00:03:49.840 Why is that important?
00:03:50.640 It is a monster book.
00:03:52.300 It's like memorizing the encyclopedia.
00:03:54.540 It's insane that I decided that that was a fun thing to do.
00:03:58.400 But I really enjoyed it.
00:03:59.380 I really enjoyed understanding how humans think and how humans interact with each other.
00:04:02.860 And so this was important to me.
00:04:04.580 And then Simone is diagnosed with autism.
00:04:07.960 Yeah, I'm just defective.
00:04:08.520 Our kid is diagnosed with autism, one of our kids.
00:04:12.100 And our other kid, very likely, by the time we get them, it's going to be diagnosed as well.
00:04:16.680 Oh, yeah, no, no.
00:04:17.340 Torsten is almost certainly – he's getting his evaluation in April because it takes a billion months
00:04:24.820 to schedule these things.
00:04:26.820 But the point being here is that I have no antagonism towards these communities,
00:04:31.000 and I am speaking from a perspective informed by research.
00:04:35.240 And actually, what we were doing with this research was genetic testing.
00:04:38.200 So we needed to clearly separate them into these different groups so we could find out
00:04:43.140 what genes were correlated with this.
00:04:45.060 And there's similar research with autism in which actually we had our oldest son participate.
00:04:49.440 Like the whole family did cheek swabs.
00:04:52.720 You, me, Octavian's younger brother and Octavian, and we all sent them in and filled out tons
00:04:58.900 of questionnaires.
00:04:59.760 So yeah, this is something that happens with schizophrenia.
00:05:03.080 It happens with autism.
00:05:03.800 It happens with a lot of things.
00:05:04.960 So let's talk about – I'm going to start with the schizophrenia spectrum because it's
00:05:09.580 the one that I think less people are familiar with.
00:05:11.980 A lot of people are familiar with the autism spectrum.
00:05:14.360 But the schizophrenia spectrum, a lot of people are unfamiliar with.
00:05:17.360 So because this might surprise people, like do you know the schizophrenia spectrum goes from
00:05:22.880 schizophrenia to what other common psychiatric condition?
00:05:27.860 You mean at the other end of it?
00:05:32.260 Like the opposite of it?
00:05:32.660 Yeah, the other end of it.
00:05:34.040 Autism?
00:05:35.140 No.
00:05:35.920 Well, what's the opposite?
00:05:36.840 I mean, schizophrenia, as I understand it, is like overmodeling humans.
00:05:39.420 Yeah, yeah, no, but this means that all of these conditions are linked.
00:05:43.260 Genetically linked.
00:05:44.180 Oh, linked.
00:05:44.620 Okay, okay.
00:05:45.040 So they're – yeah, they're linked.
00:05:46.140 Okay, so yeah.
00:05:46.680 Okay, okay.
00:05:47.440 Okay.
00:05:47.760 I'll give you a hint.
00:05:50.540 It's the single most common psychiatric condition in the world, and it's particularly
00:05:54.740 common in women.
00:05:56.460 Borderline personality disorder?
00:05:59.460 No, personality disorders aren't on the schizophrenia spectrum.
00:06:02.100 Well, the kind of ours some are, but it's depression.
00:06:05.260 Oh, huh.
00:06:06.660 Depression is one end of the schizophrenia spectrum.
00:06:09.800 Schizophrenia is the other end of the schizophrenia spectrum.
00:06:12.080 So let's go through broadly how this works, okay?
00:06:14.820 Okay, yeah.
00:06:15.560 Because all of these, they share genetic components, and they share sort of diagnostic components.
00:06:21.460 And we're also going to talk about what causes these at the end of the day, because I have
00:06:24.120 a unique theory about what causes all of this, and it's different from the mainstream community
00:06:27.540 consensus, but it's right, because I'm smarter than them.
00:06:30.060 They would have gone into the real world and made money if they were as smart as me, but
00:06:33.240 they didn't.
00:06:33.760 They stayed in academia.
00:06:36.180 Let's talk about this spectrum.
00:06:38.620 So at one end, you have depression, and then from depression, you have sort of a spectrum
00:06:42.640 from depression to bipolar, where you have periods of mania.
00:06:47.200 So bipolar is on the schizophrenic spectrum?
00:06:50.160 Well, bipolar exists in two categories.
00:06:52.340 You have bipolar one and bipolar two.
00:06:55.740 We're not going to get...
00:06:56.740 So keep in mind, it's been a while since I've done this, okay?
00:07:01.260 So bipolar is clearly related to depression.
00:07:04.960 Like, you can see that, right?
00:07:06.000 Like, you have the depressive episodes and manic episodes.
00:07:07.840 Yeah, 100%.
00:07:08.560 That's why I was surprised that you said depression was at the far end of the...
00:07:11.380 One of the two bipolars, I think it's bipolar one, the manic episodes are in part characterized
00:07:17.920 by psychotic episodes, i.e. hearing voices, seeing things, stuff like that.
00:07:23.240 Delusions of grandeur.
00:07:24.440 Delusions of grandeur, right?
00:07:25.840 Like, that's very...
00:07:26.500 Okay, okay.
00:07:27.440 I'm starting to see.
00:07:28.180 Or paranoid episodes sometimes too, right?
00:07:30.840 So you're having a level of a psychotic break there.
00:07:32.940 Then from there, you have schizoaffective disorder.
00:07:38.280 And honestly, it's been a while since I studied it, so I can't remember exactly, but I seem
00:07:44.280 to remember that the diagnostic difference between bipolar one and schizoaffective disorder
00:07:49.500 was really, really small.
00:07:52.280 It was like the difference between just like the number of days you spent on specific parts
00:07:59.560 of the spectrum.
00:08:00.420 Stages, interesting.
00:08:00.960 Yeah, and it could be different by like one day could make the difference between a diagnosis
00:08:05.480 in one category and a diagnosis in another category, which I think shows that these two
00:08:09.480 are very closely related.
00:08:10.940 Okay, I went through and checked because I was like, I want to give you guys the full answer
00:08:14.200 here.
00:08:14.700 The core difference between the two is that with schizoaffective disorder, the psychotic
00:08:20.620 episodes occur outside of just the manic phase.
00:08:24.440 And so when I was talking about like a one day difference, if you, for example, were experiencing
00:08:30.600 a psychotic episode just like one day outside of a manic period or a manic period was like
00:08:36.080 one day longer than manic periods normally are, it could change the diagnosis from bipolar
00:08:40.460 one to schizoaffective disorder.
00:08:42.080 So they're really only difference in terms of a matter of degrees, except when you're talking
00:08:46.900 about extreme manifestations of each, i.e. a person who's in like extreme depression,
00:08:51.060 also having psychotic episodes would be clearly schizoaffective.
00:08:54.220 But there's a lot, a lot of edge cases between schizoaffective and bipolar one.
00:08:58.120 In fact, the edge cases are much more normal than the extreme cases.
00:09:02.100 And of course, the DSM is famously arbitrary about many things.
00:09:05.420 Many argue that it's more of a reflection of cultural values at the time and cultural norms
00:09:11.160 than it is of actual conditions.
00:09:12.500 Well, this is very important to know that historically the DSM, you know, had things in it like same
00:09:17.220 sex attraction and stuff like that in the 1970s.
00:09:19.860 And that was considered a psychiatric condition.
00:09:21.860 It was taken out.
00:09:22.600 And now there's been a push.
00:09:24.180 And I think it might've even been taken out recently to take sadism out because they're
00:09:27.540 like, that's just a sexual preference.
00:09:28.840 Is it still in there?
00:09:29.220 It's not still in there.
00:09:30.180 It might still be in there, but yeah.
00:09:31.560 Oh, Lord.
00:09:32.300 Okay.
00:09:32.840 So then from that, you then go into schizophrenia.
00:09:35.720 Now, schizophrenia actually has a huge diversity of sort of ways that it appears in people.
00:09:42.060 I think when people think about schizophrenia, they have this like culturally primed assumption.
00:09:46.640 Yeah.
00:09:46.880 The homeless person on the street who's yelling to themselves.
00:09:49.960 Yeah.
00:09:50.120 I can just go over a few of the big ones here.
00:09:52.540 Okay.
00:09:53.120 So paranoid schizophrenia, it's one of the most common I saw.
00:09:56.160 I think it might be one of the most common.
00:09:57.400 Basically, you assume agency and like large forces of reality targeted at you that aren't
00:10:05.360 targeted at you.
00:10:06.380 So I'm trying to word this other than like you're paranoid because I think that's not
00:10:09.740 a helpful understanding.
00:10:11.760 It means that you will see something like a helicopter fly over your house and you will
00:10:16.240 assume that it's flying over your house because you are in that house and it is watching you.
00:10:21.580 You will see, you know, people whispering to each other on a bus or something like that
00:10:27.180 and you will assume they must be whispering about you.
00:10:30.580 It seems remarkably self-centered.
00:10:32.420 Like you just assume that you must be the most important person in the entire world.
00:10:36.840 Well, yes.
00:10:37.600 And this is like a gang abduction hypothesis.
00:10:40.440 It's one of the conspiracy theories I got to do.
00:10:42.140 Like gang.
00:10:43.480 I'll edit in edits because I don't remember off the top of my head.
00:10:46.200 Gang stalking is what I was thinking of.
00:10:48.140 But it's very likely paranoid schizophrenia that they're just talking about when they
00:10:52.240 talk about it.
00:10:53.260 And this is another thing that I also want to note with people is a lot of people don't
00:10:56.640 know how common hallucinations are in the population and many of these type of schizophrenia
00:11:03.820 symptoms.
00:11:05.300 All humans experience this to some extent.
00:11:08.100 Everybody sort of knows this feeling of seeing two people whisper and think, I bet they're talking
00:11:13.240 about me.
00:11:14.180 Not me, friend.
00:11:15.240 So maybe autistic people don't feel this.
00:11:17.240 I typically categorize autism and the autistic spectrum as the exact inverse of the schizophrenia
00:11:21.860 spectrum.
00:11:22.440 And we get into why.
00:11:23.480 But the thing is, many of our viewers will have had this experience.
00:11:26.860 And this is why I've always said that I'm much closer to the schizophrenia side of the
00:11:29.100 spectrum.
00:11:29.420 It's the experience I have all the time.
00:11:31.220 I'll see two people talking and I'll be like, are they making fun of me?
00:11:34.540 Are they thinking about me?
00:11:35.880 Are they, you know?
00:11:36.400 Well, and you spend so much time modeling other people where like sometimes if we're walking
00:11:39.880 and you're a little bit distracted, like I will see you like gesturing.
00:11:43.340 And I know that you're having an imaginary conversation with someone like, so, and you
00:11:47.460 were constant.
00:11:48.080 I am, I've never, and a lot of people talk about this conversation.
00:11:53.340 No, never.
00:11:54.400 And, and I, you know, a lot of people I think can really relate to this because I hear a
00:11:58.300 lot of people talk about how like they imagine having this argument with someone and how it's
00:12:02.840 going to go and I've just never experienced this ever.
00:12:08.040 So I think at least this will help people relate to it is like, okay, well, you're, you're
00:12:12.880 being a little schizoid every time you have a pretend conversation with someone, right?
00:12:19.100 Yeah.
00:12:19.280 Or another way that's very similar to this is magical thinking, which you see in this next
00:12:23.940 type of schizophrenia disorganized.
00:12:25.960 Well, so disorganized a bit different.
00:12:27.640 People have it.
00:12:28.300 They'll often talk weirdly where, so symptoms include disorganized behaviors and thoughts
00:12:33.860 alongside short lasting delusions and hallucinations.
00:12:37.080 They have disorganized speech patterns and others may find it difficult to understand
00:12:40.960 you.
00:12:41.700 People living with disorganized schizophrenia often show little or no emotions in their
00:12:45.000 facial expressions, voice, tone, or mannerisms.
00:12:47.520 And one of the things is even when we were talking was fairly like, um, they would, they
00:12:53.560 would construct sentences using words that were sometimes kind of brilliant in ways.
00:12:57.780 One of my favorite, which I've actually adopted in my lexicon is we were talking with one
00:13:02.940 of them about his like daily habits, like grooming habits.
00:13:06.620 And he goes, well, I'm no high genius, but, uh, and they would often use words like this
00:13:11.680 where they had put together words in a way that a normal person wouldn't have thought
00:13:16.280 to put them together.
00:13:17.340 I love that.
00:13:17.820 But it's immediate sense.
00:13:19.740 Like it makes so much sense.
00:13:21.260 You're like, that's the most perfect thing I've ever seen.
00:13:23.300 Like, but other people don't like, um, make that connection.
00:13:26.460 Think about that when they're structuring their language, right?
00:13:29.260 Like they don't think, oh, how do I, so their brains are literally functioning quite different
00:13:33.480 from another person's brain in terms of how they're structuring this.
00:13:35.940 Now, to the point you're making earlier and in paranoid schizophrenia, because you also
00:13:39.260 get them paranoid schizophrenia is a symptom you call magical thinking.
00:13:42.260 Um, magical thinking would be like, you saw a display window at Macy's or something, and
00:13:50.640 you assume that that window is meant to communicate something to you, or you see a commercial and
00:13:56.520 you're like, that commercial is supposed to communicate something to me.
00:13:59.840 Many people could argue our entire religious framework that you and I use is a form of magical
00:14:04.540 thinking where we're looking to Abrahamic texts to find out what are they communicating
00:14:09.000 to us.
00:14:09.660 So a lot of schizophrenic type behaviors and thoughts are very related to religious thoughts.
00:14:16.760 You know, when somebody is looking at reality and they're looking for signs from God, that
00:14:22.280 is in a way, a form of magical thinking.
00:14:24.820 You are looking at things that do not have intentionality the way a store display is arranged
00:14:31.260 or what's going on in a commercial.
00:14:33.080 Like it has a form of intentionality, but it's certainly not targeted directly at you.
00:14:36.180 And yet you are assuming and modeling that thing as if it had like a human brain or a human brain
00:14:42.920 went into constructing it to send a signal to you in a beautiful mind.
00:14:48.580 I don't know if you saw that movie.
00:14:49.800 It followed somebody with schizophrenia who believed that he was finding patterns, puzzles of like code
00:14:56.660 words, put into newspapers and he was like a math genius.
00:15:01.560 So he kept whatever he would look at newspapers.
00:15:03.940 He kept overlaying various like mathematical equations.
00:15:08.000 Oh, no.
00:15:09.080 Onto the page.
00:15:10.000 And whenever one of them would lead to the page saying something, he would then be like, that must be a
00:15:15.320 message meant for me.
00:15:16.400 So implying intentionality where no intentionality exists.
00:15:20.220 Yeah.
00:15:20.880 Interesting.
00:15:21.240 So that is one thing you'll have there.
00:15:24.380 Now, another type of schizophrenia that a lot of people don't know is schizophrenia is catatonic
00:15:28.260 schizophrenia.
00:15:29.620 So catatonic schizophrenia, if you've ever seen a movie that takes place in like a, have
00:15:33.520 you ever seen a movie that takes place in a psych ward and you've seen somebody like in a weird
00:15:37.180 position like this, catatonic schizophrenia.
00:15:39.980 And if you like move their hand, it's called like waxy.
00:15:42.780 Like that's the word, the technical term for it.
00:15:45.200 They'll stay in this new position like Gumby or something.
00:15:48.540 Gosh.
00:15:48.940 And they can be stuck like that for very long periods.
00:15:52.940 Doesn't it hurt?
00:15:54.040 You'd think it would hurt.
00:15:55.940 Well, would they describe it as, and again, this is something that I can kind of model in my head.
00:16:00.780 Have you ever felt these moments where you're so mentally overloaded, you're kind of frozen?
00:16:05.640 Yeah.
00:16:05.860 That's whenever I say, my name is Simone Collins and I am washing the dishes.
00:16:10.820 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:16:11.800 That's different from this.
00:16:12.760 This is sort of rebooting.
00:16:14.240 She has this pattern of rebooting where she's like, my name is Simone Collins and I'm doing X.
00:16:18.320 When she forgets where she is and what she's doing.
00:16:20.680 No, this is like something has happened in your life or something like that.
00:16:25.040 Or you are so stricken with like an emotional context because like you're embarrassed you did something and you just realized you did it or something like that.
00:16:31.140 And you're just like, and you're just processing this for a bit.
00:16:35.580 These people are sort of stuck in that processing moment.
00:16:38.600 Because they're so overwhelmed.
00:16:40.000 They're so overwhelmed with thoughts.
00:16:41.700 Oh, and yeah, with like specifically their schizophrenic thoughts, perhaps with like modeling a lot of people and stuff, right?
00:16:47.260 Yes.
00:16:47.940 Yes.
00:16:49.400 Undifferentiated schizophrenia is what I was thinking of.
00:16:50.920 This is where you have signs of a few different things.
00:16:53.040 I've been thinking undifferentiated schizophrenia when I was thinking disorganized schizophrenia.
00:16:56.720 It's very specific.
00:16:58.320 And that's easy for me to catch.
00:16:59.760 Undifferentiated does sound like a catch-all.
00:17:01.380 It's just like you see a lot of different symptoms from different categories.
00:17:05.460 Residual schizophrenia.
00:17:06.260 Oh, yeah, I was just saying I don't remember seeing patients who had something called this.
00:17:10.800 But yeah, this is they had a history of schizophrenic psychosis but only experienced negative symptoms such as slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration, and poor hygiene.
00:17:18.500 So this is actually a really important one to talk about.
00:17:20.960 So every time you have a psychotic break in schizophrenia, these things get worse.
00:17:25.220 These things I just noted there.
00:17:27.160 Slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration, poor hygiene.
00:17:29.940 What is happening when you have a schizophrenic break is your brain is basically being flooded with chemicals that can be thought of as analogous to the sort of exogenous chemicals that you take when you're on drugs or something, like taking a ton of hallucinogens.
00:17:43.120 And this is a big mistake that a lot of people, especially like bipolar people I know make, where they're like, I'll just tough it out.
00:17:50.040 Right?
00:17:50.280 Like it's more natural.
00:17:51.700 It's like it's not natural.
00:17:52.820 Your brain is not supposed to be doing this.
00:17:54.740 The chemicals that are flooding your brain, especially if they're causing psychotic episodes, are causing the exact same damage as hallucinogens, if not more.
00:18:04.380 And you will suffer the same long-term consequences of a hallucinogen addict or more.
00:18:11.200 Slow speech, poor memory, poor hygiene.
00:18:14.400 And so a lot of people are afraid of taking drugs, you know, pharmaceuticals that lower the symptoms of these sorts of conditions on the schizophrenic spectrum.
00:18:23.900 And you really shouldn't be.
00:18:26.860 You will have permanent, it gets worse, and we saw this with schizophrenic patients, every time they have a break, they permanently get worse after that.
00:18:33.340 Yeah, I remember one of the first things, like first mental health stances that you gave to me that I thought was really interesting when we were really early in our dating was that, like, sometimes it's just so, so, so important to take medications for a mental condition.
00:18:45.720 Because your current chemical state with your brain is super, super not natural and causing a lot of damage.
00:18:51.580 Like, it is, no, don't find some natural, don't think through it, don't therapy through it.
00:18:56.480 It's not going to fix it.
00:18:57.640 There is, you are high right now, and you need to fix it.
00:19:00.780 Which I, yeah, I'm glad you're pointing this out.
00:19:02.380 Yeah, well, some people, and this goes, you know, when we talk about our psychology and psychiatry thing and stuff like that, and our just tough it out stance with a lot of this stuff.
00:19:10.240 When we're talking about, like, wimpy stuff, like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to say this, it was an audience that this is going to be very offensive to potential.
00:19:16.520 You can see our all trauma is self-inflicted video for more understanding of this.
00:19:20.600 But a lot of the data shows this.
00:19:22.700 A lot of, like, what modern psychology calls problems, like trauma, is self-inflicted.
00:19:26.800 When you're talking about something like psychotic episodes or a major depressive disorder, this is no f***ing joke.
00:19:33.800 You should take this seriously.
00:19:35.280 You should take your medication.
00:19:36.620 And the number one way you're going to die is stopping to take that medication.
00:19:40.220 And we saw this with our patients all the time.
00:19:41.900 Because another thing I did is I collected brains from the ME.
00:19:44.600 So I knew people who I worked with for a while.
00:19:46.980 And when the ME, I was able to read their books.
00:19:48.180 Oh, my God.
00:19:48.600 Did you collect brains from people that you'd interviewed?
00:19:50.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:19:51.740 That's so tough.
00:19:52.720 That is how people die.
00:19:53.880 They stop taking their medication.
00:19:55.120 Oh, my God.
00:19:56.780 So, well, and another thing is people will be like, but with depression, your medication increases suicide risk.
00:20:01.580 Yeah, it does.
00:20:02.560 But it doesn't really matter that it does.
00:20:04.780 Okay, so I need to be more explicit here.
00:20:06.840 So the reason why it was major depressive disorder, because one of the things major depressive disorder is associated with is like a lack of motivation and a lack of ability to motivate yourself.
00:20:15.500 The drugs that lower that.
00:20:18.920 But you still remember it having happened recently.
00:20:21.640 You still are horrified by it.
00:20:23.340 And you are still in a slightly depressed state.
00:20:25.420 Well, now you just have more motivation and more agency.
00:20:28.480 And you are doing what you feel, you know, needs to be done to release you from this state.
00:20:32.620 But it is not that the drugs aren't working.
00:20:34.200 They lead to suicide, not because they make you more depressed, but because they give you more agency.
00:20:37.760 But we've got to keep going here with some of these.
00:20:41.540 We can also just talk more about like, so like the differences between the autistic and schizoid spectrum and why we talk about it a lot.
00:20:48.920 Because I didn't get to the final thing that I want to say here.
00:20:52.780 Okay.
00:20:53.400 Speed it up, though.
00:20:54.480 Okay.
00:20:54.880 Well, a lot of people have psychotic like episodes, like they're more common than people think.
00:21:00.100 So a quarter of humans will hear like hallucinatory voices at some point in their lives.
00:21:05.240 They will hear somebody talking to them that's not there.
00:21:08.400 No.
00:21:08.480 This is very common.
00:21:09.880 Auditory hallucinations within schizophrenia.
00:21:11.480 By the way, if you're talking to somebody who's like faking schizophrenia, if they're talking about visual hallucinations and not audible hallucinations, they're probably faking it.
00:21:20.100 Because audible hallucinations are the number one symptom.
00:21:22.760 Visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare.
00:21:25.140 Okay.
00:21:26.260 So that's just sort of worth noting.
00:21:28.780 So like these symptoms and these things in schizophrenia, like these moments of catatonic schizophrenia, these moments of paranoid schizophrenia, these moments of magical thinking are something that a lot of people can empathize with.
00:21:40.020 And so we can see that a lot of people have this level of this sort of in the background running within them.
00:21:44.920 Okay.
00:21:45.100 So you wanted to get to the, what would you want to go to?
00:21:47.800 Well, we have theories as to why autism and schizophrenia exist.
00:21:53.780 And we describe a lot of people as being on these spectrums because we think that a lot of people have moderate versions of them that give them advantages in society.
00:22:06.580 There's a reason why genetically, because there is a high genetic basis for these conditions, that things like autism and schizophrenia provide advantages in moderation.
00:22:15.620 We need to talk about these two spectrums because they're pretty different from each other.
00:22:18.760 Yeah.
00:22:19.060 But I'm just, I want to get to that because that's the juicy part.
00:22:21.860 Well.
00:22:22.600 You're just reading through lists.
00:22:23.920 It's not really, but okay.
00:22:25.180 I'll talk about the quote unquote juicy part.
00:22:27.080 So the autism spectrum is basically a spectrum from having autism to not having autism.
00:22:31.860 The schizophrenia spectrum is a spectrum.
00:22:34.240 It can almost be thought of as like a conal spectrum.
00:22:36.300 It's a spectrum of one iteration of a psychiatric condition to another iteration of a psychiatric condition.
00:22:44.360 And then within that sort of like line, you can think of a spot on the other side, which is a completely mentally healthy individual and like a conal radiant going to that line.
00:22:52.840 And you can be anywhere on that spectrum of like depressed or manic depressive to a completely normal person or schizophrenic to a completely normal person.
00:23:01.800 So you're talking about these two sort of, one is a conic spectrum and then one is the autistic spectrum.
00:23:08.000 My intuition from what I've seen about these two spectrums is that if you are drawing like a conal line and you have like an average person at like the center of where this line is drawn from, right?
00:23:17.520 And then you have the schizophrenia spectrum of psychological disorders and you drew a line like from the center of that cone out in the exact opposite direction, that would be the autistic spectrum.
00:23:28.680 I am not aware of ever seeing comorbidity between autism and schizophrenia in my experience.
00:23:34.380 And it's because I think that they are exactly the antithesis of each other.
00:23:37.820 And this is the part that you probably find interesting that you want me to talk about, which is my theory of what's causing schizophrenia.
00:23:43.620 The common thing in all of these, so I need a little background knowledge before I do this.
00:23:49.620 Okay, we're going to talk quickly about transmagnetic stimulation.
00:23:55.100 So transmagnetic stimulation is a device.
00:23:58.720 It's like a little figure eight sign paddle that you put on your head and it can be used to either hyperactivate or sort of turn off sections of your brain using transmagnetic stimulation.
00:24:08.780 And this can be useful in a lot of experiments and stuff like that.
00:24:11.420 Like there's cool things you can do where you can have somebody like looking at letters and then you put it on their head and all of a sudden they don't know what they're looking at.
00:24:17.820 They're like, I understand their letters, but I don't know what they're saying anymore.
00:24:21.540 So you can literally like turn off.
00:24:23.380 Now, a lot of experiments have been done with it.
00:24:25.140 It's like disrupting a radio signal essentially, right?
00:24:27.420 I mean, metaphorically.
00:24:30.000 Not at all, but.
00:24:31.060 No?
00:24:31.460 Okay, think of it that way.
00:24:32.720 It's not important exactly how it works for this conversation.
00:24:35.800 Now, it's also important to note with this that I do not think TMS is safe and I think that in the future we will talk about TMS in the same way that we talked about experiments that used hallucinogens in the 70s today.
00:24:45.860 I do not think we have good evidence that this is a safe thing to do given the severity of what people are doing with it.
00:24:51.260 But anyway, so TMS.
00:24:53.620 So one thing you can do with TMS is hyperstimulate parts of a person's brain.
00:24:58.780 Oh, so you can like turn up in addition to turning down.
00:25:03.580 It's like the volume down.
00:25:04.400 Yeah, you can turn up.
00:25:04.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:05.160 Neat.
00:25:05.600 Okay.
00:25:06.100 And when you hyperstimulate them, like you're lowering the amount of signal that's needed to create an action potential within them.
00:25:12.380 I don't need to go into what this is.
00:25:14.600 But if you hyperstimulate like the parts that like you turned off, like remember when I was talking about seeing letters?
00:25:18.940 You can hyperstimulate those parts and they'll look at letters and they won't be able to help but say the letters they're looking at.
00:25:24.520 Oh.
00:25:24.820 So they will look at an A and they'll say A, B, they can't stop from doing it.
00:25:29.680 Wow.
00:25:29.860 Because basically when you add this little bit of extra stimulation, i.e. like the visual stimulation of seeing it and processing the letter, it accidentally triggers the pathway that's tied to talking about it.
00:25:41.060 So what I think is happening in schizophrenic patients is the pathway that's tied to a human theory of mind.
00:25:46.780 So let's talk quickly about a theory of mind.
00:25:48.320 A theory of mind is what I do.
00:25:50.940 So I model people, right?
00:25:52.440 Like when I am seeing you and I am trying to predict you, like another person, not Simone.
00:25:57.080 I never really predict her because I don't need to.
00:25:59.660 She just tells me what she thinks.
00:26:01.220 It's really nice.
00:26:02.260 This is part of being autistic, okay?
00:26:03.840 So I am emulating, like emulating a video game or something like that or emulating another operating system.
00:26:11.360 I'm emulating their mind within my mind.
00:26:14.620 Like I have a little model of their mind running in my mind whenever I'm talking to somebody.
00:26:19.220 And that model helps me predict how they are going to react to the things I'm saying.
00:26:25.020 And kids take a while to develop this.
00:26:27.080 One of the famous experiments around this is you get a kid to draw a shape that you're looking at from like their perspective.
00:26:32.520 You're like, can you draw this shape from my perspective?
00:26:34.720 And there's a certain age, I think it's like four or five or something, where kids can start realizing, oh, they're not seeing the shape from my perspective.
00:26:41.560 I need to draw it from their perspective.
00:26:43.100 Like their eyes are somewhere else in relation to the shape when contrasted with my eyes.
00:26:47.500 And this takes a while to do, right?
00:26:48.840 Well, we can also like summon theory of minds when we're doing things.
00:26:54.860 We can create a theory of mind of like a person who we had an argument with and then continue to have that argument with them with this modeled iteration of them inside of our own brain.
00:27:04.720 And then that's when you win the argument, of course.
00:27:06.600 And you're like, gosh, why didn't I say that in the real?
00:27:08.500 Like you're basically replaying tons of scenarios with them afterwards.
00:27:11.960 Whereas I just go home and I'm like, man, I hate being around people.
00:27:16.440 Yeah.
00:27:16.560 But then another theory of mind that you can do is, you know, you can sort of imbue like an animal with a theory of mind, right?
00:27:23.580 Like you can interact with your dog and then theory of mind your dog as if it was a human.
00:27:28.300 Or if you're from like one of the more mystical religious traditions, you can theory of mind a waterfall, right?
00:27:34.120 You can be like, oh, that must have a theory of mind, right?
00:27:36.140 Like it's doing this now because it's angry with us.
00:27:38.760 You can theory mind the sky.
00:27:40.240 So theory of mind is just like a classic thing that humans do as part of a lot of religious traditions.
00:27:45.500 We'll talk about that later.
00:27:46.300 Or it can be used by them to create significance where no significance exists, which is a sin.
00:27:52.660 Sorry.
00:27:53.120 That's just like we'll go into this later in some of our tracks.
00:27:55.580 But theory of mind.
00:27:57.020 So what I think is happening with schizophrenic individuals is that their theory of mind is basically hyper stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.
00:28:07.040 And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations.
00:28:09.300 And I think that's why auditory hallucinations are the most common is essentially they are running models of other people when they shouldn't be running models of other people.
00:28:20.120 And they can hear these models of other people that they're running in the background.
00:28:23.600 This is why, you know, one of the most common is just like hearing whispers because they're not running full models.
00:28:27.380 It's not like fully running.
00:28:28.280 It's just like barely rumbling in the background.
00:28:30.860 It's running in their mind, but it's not fully breaking into their consciousness.
00:28:35.020 There's other people that are seeing like full theory of mind.
00:28:37.260 Well, this becomes relevant because almost every symptom of schizophrenia can be explained by a theory of mind operating when it's not supposed to be operating.
00:28:44.680 Yeah, like on overdrive.
00:28:45.640 Yeah, so this happens when you see something like, you know, applying a theory of mind to the way things are arranged in a store window, applying a theory of mind to like world events, right?
00:28:58.160 Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's directly relevant to you or a theory of mind creating a hallucination.
00:29:03.760 Catatonia is the one counter example here.
00:29:06.060 But what I suspect is really happening with Catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.
00:29:13.620 They're paralyzed by their thoughts.
00:29:15.180 Yes, yeah, that makes sense to me.
00:29:17.060 I mean, they're basically running like five consciousnesses simultaneously.
00:29:20.700 Yeah, it's like when you are running too many programs on an older computer and it just like stops.
00:29:26.200 Yeah, that's basically what's happening.
00:29:27.820 So autism, I think, is literally defined by the exact opposite.
00:29:31.160 I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people.
00:29:38.360 And this is what creates problems in autism, like not being able to recognize emotions as easily,
00:29:42.840 or not recognizing when people aren't interested in something that you're talking to them about.
00:29:47.760 And as Simone says, her as an autistic person, Simone, I want to be clear.
00:29:52.400 It is not normal to not have arguments with people in your heads.
00:29:55.840 That is something that normal people do.
00:29:58.300 It is.
00:29:58.420 I think that's something that a schizoid person would say sometimes.
00:30:01.380 Right.
00:30:01.880 No, but that is, and this is what we talk about with me being more towards the schizoid side and her being more towards the autism side.
00:30:07.060 Like we are both opposite sides of the exact opposite sides of the spectrum where I run theory of minds too frequently and too easily, but I am uniquely good at it.
00:30:17.720 And I think that people are like, why would like schizophrenia exist?
00:30:21.280 Because it existed about equal rates across populations and it exists likely because people like me have a genetic advantage over people not like me.
00:30:29.280 I mean, one of the things.
00:30:30.060 So yeah, anyone in a social, like living in a society, civilization, a tribe, a city is going to be to have an advantage if they're able to play the game of chess better, you know, to model other people's next moves, to anticipate them, to think what they're thinking, because then it is easier to get ahead and to have an edge.
00:30:49.140 But then I also think that maybe the reason why people carrying autistic traits have continued to perpetuate is that sometimes being free of that burden enables you to think more systematically in a way that makes you useful to society as an inventor, as a builder, as a producer.
00:31:06.280 I agree.
00:31:07.140 And so then that's why those genes have also been carried on.
00:31:10.320 It's just a worker, like, you know, you get the work done because you're not so busy socializing and thinking about people and modeling people and trying to play games, which is frankly not very productive.
00:31:20.420 I mean, you see this in like other contexts where like there was that one famous study of I think a travel agency building somewhere, a company in Southeast Asia that had people at the office and people at work from home and work from home people were more productive, but they didn't get promotions.
00:31:34.680 So it was really interesting.
00:31:36.300 It was like, well, working in an office is good if getting ahead is what matters.
00:31:40.320 Having people work from home is good if getting stuff done is what matters.
00:31:43.180 And you kind of need both people in society, right?
00:31:45.280 You need people who are capable of getting ahead and amassing power and amassing resources and wealth.
00:31:49.540 And you also need people who are good at just getting things done.
00:31:52.200 That's why these two things on a spectrum.
00:31:54.460 Now we have to worry, are we washing out our genes?
00:31:57.060 Like was my unique genius being able to model people?
00:31:59.400 It appears that my autism is overpowered.
00:32:02.220 It does in our kids.
00:32:03.660 I'll say that.
00:32:04.220 Yeah.
00:32:04.520 And we can't tell yet with our daughter, who's around like 16 months now with our two sons.
00:32:09.320 So it is extremely clear there.
00:32:11.400 Well, autism appears more in males than females.
00:32:13.640 So it manifests more in a diagnosable way.
00:32:16.920 I mean, this is why I wasn't diagnosed until our son was diagnosed.
00:32:19.020 Remember when, who was it?
00:32:20.280 Diana Fleischman was on our show and she was saying that in women, or no, no, it wasn't.
00:32:24.740 This was Louise Perry.
00:32:25.580 She was saying that women, like a woman with a 70 IQ has a better ability to model the emotional states of others than a man with a 120 IQ.
00:32:34.680 Yeah, I think that was Diana.
00:32:36.040 Yeah.
00:32:36.900 No, it wasn't Diana.
00:32:37.800 It was Louise Perry.
00:32:39.480 Okay.
00:32:39.780 Yeah, it was in the episode on feminism or whatever.
00:32:42.140 Anyway, so the very interesting is, is I think that that's what's causing that.
00:32:46.040 Because women have this naturally higher emotional intelligence that it often gets hidden in them when they have a lower ability to model other people.
00:32:57.120 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.
00:33:00.200 It is remarkable how many low-hanging fruits there are within the sciences.
00:33:04.460 People are like, well, why don't you like test them and prove them and stuff like that?
00:33:07.480 Why don't you stay in the community?
00:33:08.460 Because this would have been my entire career.
00:33:10.360 This one theory would have been 30, 40 years of my life just proving out.
00:33:14.540 And I've been able to have like a panoply of other theories in the field of sexuality because I was able to do independent research on that.
00:33:20.360 I'm able to have theories in the field of theology, which I'm really interested in because, you know, like if I had trapped myself in academia, I wouldn't be able to live the life of a gentleman scientist, which I much prefer.
00:33:31.700 Academia is collapsing anyways, right?
00:33:34.220 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.
00:33:36.040 I love you too.
00:33:36.900 And I'm glad you shared your thoughts on this because it's super interesting.
00:33:40.100 So thank you.
00:33:40.840 I love your beautiful mind.
00:33:44.540 I love you too.