Professor Jeffrey Lieberman discusses the hypothesis that schizophrenia is caused by a group of genes producing abnormalities in brain development.

It is generally believed, and there is a lot of evidence to support the fact, that the cause of schizophrenia originates in the way a certain group of genes produce abnormalities in the development of the brain. Now these are not gross abnormalities where there are clear deformation of the brain or it doesn’t develop, these are very subtle abnormalities that cause selected neural circuits to form in a way that doesn’t quite make them fully functional and fully viable in the face of all of the different types of activities they have to perform in the course of an individual’s lifetime. And therefore, when they’re overused or overstressed, they can breakdown. And if they breakdown it causes the symptoms of the illness to develop. So, schizophrenia is believed to develop because of the fact that a certain group of genes affects the way specific neural circuits develop and these happen to be the neural circuits that affect higher thinking processes (how we form beliefs, how we perceive and interpret stimuli) and when these get disturbed, they become dysfunctional, and this produces the symptoms of schizophrenia.

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