Let’s try something new this week. Inspired by Dave Munger’s new blog, The Daily Monthly, I’m going to try posting about a single topic for a week. This week’s topic will be schizophrenia. We’ll start with Elyn Saks, a professor of law at the University of Southern California and a winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2009. Saks is what you’d call a high-functioning schizophrenic. In a recent Q&A with Scientific American, she compared her symptoms to a waking nightmare.

Objectively, I have delusions (irrational beliefs like that I have killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts); infrequent hallucinations (like watching a huge spider walk up my wall); and disorganized and confused thinking (e.g. what are called “loose associations,” like “my copies of the cases have been infiltrated. We have to case the joint. I don’t believe in joints but they do hold your body together”). These are called “positive symptoms” of schizophrenia. Except for my first two years at Oxford, I have been spared the so-called “negative symptoms”: apathy, withdrawal, inability to work or make friends.

COOK: Do you experience symptoms every day or week? What are they?

SAKS: As my husband likes to say, psychosis is not like an on-off switch but like a dimmer. At one end of the spectrum, I will have transient crazy thoughts (e.g. I have killed people) which I immediately identify as symptoms of my illness and not real. A little further along the spectrum, I may have three or four days of being dominated by crazy thoughts that I can’t push away. And at the far end I am crouching in a corner shaking and moaning.

The transient psychotic thoughts I might have several times a day. The several-day episodes are usually a response to stress and may happen three or four times a year. The experience of crouching in the corner hasn’t happened for years.

She goes on to describe how her work helps her cope with her symptoms by giving her a “center.”

Here’s something I didn’t know this morning about the snow that’s been pummeling the mid-Atlantic states:

[T]hese ‘snowpocalypses’ that have been going through DC and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming.

Why is that? The thinking that warmer air temperatures on the earth, a higher air temperature, has a greater capacity to hold moisture at any temperature.  And then as winter comes in, that warm air cools full of water, and you get heavier precipitation on a more regular basis. In fact, you could argue these storms are not evidence of a lack of global warming, but are evidence of global warming – thus the 26 inches of snowfall in the DC area and the second giant storm this year.

That’s from MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, who must be reading Joe Romm.

Here’s a reason to love science, and just in time for Valentine’s Day.

In one small experiment on sexual response to food scents, vaginal and penile blood flow was measured in 31 men and women who wore masks emitting various food aromas. This was the study that found men susceptible to the scent of doughnuts mingled with licorice. For women, first place for most arousing was a tie between baby powder and the combination of Good & Plenty candy with cucumber. Coming in second was a combination of Good & Plenty and banana nut bread.

This research comes to us via the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation. I love the recruitment method:

The team recruited volunteers literate in English through solicitation on classic rock radio broadcasts.

For a debunking of various aphrodisiacs, LiveScience has a handy top 10 list.

This past weekend I caught the beginning of an episode of Radio Lab, the NPR show, featuring one of my science journalist heroes, John Horgan, asking whether war will ever end.

Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He took to the streets of Hoboken to survey passers by whether they thought war would ever end once and for all. Only about 10 percent of the people he surveyed expressed optimism that war would ever end. When asked why, people chalked it up to our “human nature” to be aggressive.

Part of what I want to do with this blog is to point out examples of unquestioned, unarticulated values and beliefs masquerading as science or as Truth. In this case, the idea of a human nature has little to do with carefully considered logic and everything to do with whether people can accept the possibility of change.

Horgan wrote an article for Discover magazine in which he works to undercut some of our ingrained belief that war is a part of human nature. Here’s one juicy bit:

Environmental conditions can also override biology among baboons, who, much like chimpanzees, seem hardwired for aggression. Since early 1978, [biologist Robert] Sapolsky has traveled to Kenya to spy on baboons, including Forest Troop, a group living near a tourist lodge’s garbage dump. Because they had to fight baboons from another troop over the scraps of food, only the toughest males of Forest Troop frequented the dump. In the mid-1980s, all these males died after contracting tuberculosis from contaminated meat.

The epidemic left Forest Troop with many more females than males, and the remaining males were far less pugnacious. Conflict within the troop dropped dramatically; Sapolsky even observed adult males grooming each other. This, he points out in an article in Foreign Affairs, is “nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.” The sea change has persisted through the present, as male adolescents who join the troop adapt to its mores. “Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible?” Sapolsky asks. “Anyone who says, ‘No, it is beyond our nature,’ knows too little about primates, including ourselves.”

And further:

[Anthropologist Douglas] Fry believes that empowering females may reduce the rate of violence committed within and by a nation. He notes that in Finland—which has a low rate of crime and violence compared with other developed countries—a majority of the cabinet ministers and more than 40 percent of the members of Parliament are women. “I don’t see this as a panacea,” Fry adds, recalling “iron lady” Margaret Thatcher, “but there are good reasons for having a balance of the more caring sex in government.”

For those who see no end to war, a more defensible position might be that *conflict* will never end so long as we exist. War and violence are specific responses to conflict, as are peace and mercy. The question is how to activate those latter qualities, especially in light of climate change, which is bound to increase conflicts over rights to water and other natural resources.

Those of you who are able to might want to check out an HBO movie that airs this weekend about the life of Temple Grandin, the autistic savant who works on developing more humane practices for slaughtering livestock.

From the LA Times:

“Temple Grandin,” which debuts Saturday, focuses on Grandin’s youth and early years as a scientist when she labored to get the cattle industry to take notice of her inventions. Because of her autism, Grandin “thinks in pictures,” as she says, an ability that gives her insight into how animals view the world. She persuaded the industry to adopt her reforms in the face of mockery and outright hostility. Along the way, Grandin struggled with the limitations imposed by her autism: her terror of sliding glass doors, her aversion to being touched, the panic attacks triggered by overstimulation.

From NPR:

Grandin’s story is, by any measure, impressive. She didn’t speak until she was 4. The doctor who officially diagnosed her, following the protocol of the era, recommended she be institutionalized.

He also suggested, matter of factly, that Temple’s autism was probably her mother’s fault. Because Temple resisted physical human interaction like hugging, her mother must have been cold and unaffectionate.

Happily, her mother (played very nicely by Julia Ormond) rejected this Dark Ages thinking and taught Temple to read, write and speak.

But it wasn’t until she was sent to boarding school that mother and daughter met a teacher, Dr. Carlock (David Straithairn), who explained that Temple was simply wired differently.

Click on the NPR link for a nice interview with Grandin.