It was noted yesterday that Bernard Crespi and colleagues have released further findings suggesting a relationship between schizophrenia and autism. At neoteny.org I’ve written about Crespi’s work and where I agree with the direction he is taking.
Crespi and I both believe that how brains lateralize and the width of corpus callosum connections influence the etiology of both conditions. I suggest that the origin of human split consciousness or self awareness is also integrally connected to these issues. We are both approaching this from an evolutionary perspective.
Whereas autism displays features of primary process or humans perhaps 4000 generations ago, I hypothesize that some forms of schizophrenia represents an opposite of primary process or a human so split, so self aware, they can’t easily encourage both sides to work together.
Crespi’s conclusion that autistic brains are larger, schizophrenic’s smaller, support this way of looking at the information.
