Scientists develop 'schizophrenic' network

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently used a virtual computer model, also known as a neural network, to test what happens when the brain releases excess dopamine, reveals PC World.

In doing so, they found that the network acted schizophrenic, in other words, they gave a computer Schizophrenia.

The researchers, in an effort to study disorganised speech and delusions in schizophrenia, simulated eight different corresponding illness mechanisms in 'Discern', an artificial neural network model for narrative understanding and recall.

Some of these illness mechanisms involved malfunctions in 'working memory, semantics, prediction error, and dopamine neuromodulation.'

“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance of the salience of experience,” Texas grad student Uli Grasemann said in a release, writes Fierce Biotech IT.

“When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from.”

Many researchers believe that schizophrenics suffer from what is known as 'hyper-learning', or an inability to forget or ignore as much as they should.

As a result, they learn the ability to take what's meaningful out of the vast amounts of information pumped through the brains everyday. So, schizophrenics make connections that are not real or they lose the ability to weave a coherent narrative out of life.

Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, claimed that the network's behaviour was eerily similar to that of human schizophrenics, says Uber Gizmo.