How to Build a Schizophrenic Computer

By Mary Beth Griggs, Popular Mechanics


To try to understand how schizophrenia affects the brain, scientists tweaked a computer system until it began to exhibit the same symptoms as a schizophrenic human mind. The results point to a new idea about how this condition in the brain could arise.

Schizophrenia is one of the most infamous and mysterious mental disorders. Attempting to get to the root of the problem, scientists recently came up with an extraordinary solution: They built a schizophrenic computer. In a study published in the online version of Biological Psychiatry in March, researchers altered an artificial neural network capable of learning language and stories, to the point where it started "acting" schizophrenic.

People who suffer from schizophrenia often have difficulty thinking logically or discerning what is real or not real in their lives. "It is characterized by delusions or disassociation of language, often with hallucinations of spoken speech," says psychiatrist Ralph Hoffman of Yale University, coauthor of the study along with computer scientist Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas, Austin. Because of that language disassociation, struggling to recount stories correctly is one of the early signs of schizophrenia. So to gain new insight into how schizophrenia might affect the human brain, Hoffman and Miikkulainen tried to give a storytelling computer system the same problem.

To make a schizophrenic computer, they began...

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