Medical Xpress published a snippet on a study concerning schizophrenia and social interaction which found, essentially, that schizophrenics don’t use past information correctly in predicting the intentions of others. The particular clustering of schizophrenic symptoms changed the particular misuse, but the overall import is that schizophrenia damages someone’s ability to correctly analyze and therefore predict the behavior of others.
I think there are two related points to be drawn from this. First, it hints at home the wiring in the human mind is accomplished. Pinker, among others, has noted how remarkable the similarities in human language and interpersonal development are across cultures, and many have noted that there’s very little of the genome left to account for this. Consider that humans have a genome that is 99% identical to that of a chimp, and yet our mental and social abilities are dramatically greater. This insight has lead to a renewed fascination with how the mind is actually constructed post-fertilization, once the genome is set. Embryology is obviously crucial, but more pertinent here is the self-assembling properties of the brain. Starting with fairly simple instructions, the brain manages to bootstrap itself into an immensely powerful machine, and by looking at it in a broken state, as in schizophrenics, we can better understand the occluded systems that allow it to function so well in the normal state of affairs.
It is probably fair to say that the innate human talent for social relations requires that a young child observe human interaction in his or her formative years in order to develop normally. This suggests that the brain does not have all the information it needs in order to communicate and interact with other people, which is also supported by considerations of available genome space, above. Concisely, the brain probably has a rough template for speech and interaction, and a rudimentary theory of mind, but all of these are refined and corrected to some degree by observation. Anyone who’s been around children appreciates their keen ability to imitate, but what might not be obvious is the degree to which human social interaction depends on everyone having had roughly similar exemplars. Many of the sub-fields of anthropology have, in my opinion, made a fetish of relatively trivial cultural differences, and tend to gloss over the strong similarities in speech patterns and theories of mind across completely separate human groups. In computational terms, the software is almost the same everywhere, which makes sense given that the hardware is essentially identical and resources to power the brain are at a premium.
The second point of relevance here is that, when we’re considering the morally appropriate approach to criminals with mental defects of some sort, we need to consider which systems specifically are affected. As of now, the law generally makes no principled distinction between someone who has a blunting of mental processes, as in disease that cause developmental delay or regression, and someone who has a distinct brain system broken or crippled, as in micro-tumor patients and (probably) schizophrenics. Most states follow the McNaughton test, which holds that the relevant question was whether, at the time of the act, the defendant knew the nature of his conduct, and that it was wrong. People with relevant knowledge in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, or related fields will recognize this as a grossly simplified test that is essentially impossible to answer, save in the most vague and conclusory ways. Like our social interaction, McNaughton takes for granted that defendants have similar minds to ours, which is of course absurd when the test is only applied to people who have substantially different minds.
A better approach would necessitate a more realistic picture of the brain. The standards for commitment of the seriously insane rightfully, in my opinion, eschews questions of the patient’s brain and focuses only on their dangerousness to themselves or others. Knowing better what sorts of brain problems a particular person has better lets us gauge the social morality of confining that person, and frankly notions of moral culpability are too obtuse to be shoe-horned into what is essentially a scientific question. Holmes called for a law purged of morality, and in this case we can at least argue for a legal standard purged of inapplicable morality. Forms of mental defect are as varied sorts of criminals, and treating them all alike is obviously unjust. McNaughton does not do a good job of sorting, assuming what we actually care about is dangerousness.
Lastly, my experience in criminal law suggests that schizophrenics are over-represented in criminal cases, and one can hope that this sort of research will eventually result in better treatments. While extant therapies help a lot and are certainly a marked improvement over historical approaches, they are still not very good, really, and since the problems in schizophrenia are likely structural, reverse-engineering seems like a good way to look for a better approach.
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