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Imagine looking at your bedroom and nothing seems to be right. Nothing’s wrong that you can identify, but somehow the objects in their places aren’t a coherent scene; it doesn’t make sense, it’s hard to say what is really where. You hear your mom calling you to come for dinner and at the same time someone you can’t see is gibbering in your ear that she’s not your mom, you shouldn’t be here. The doorknob on your bedroom door seems to be different, much more important than the rest of the wall, threatening you somehow.

Now imagine going to the doctor because you’re sick, and they do no measurements. They talk to you, but they don’t take your temperature and look for a fever, they don’t draw blood and run tests for various antibodies, they don’t do an x-ray to look for a broken bone. Imagine that all they could do was talk to you, ask you about how you were feeling and listen to how you responded.

That’s where we are with schizophrenia and many other neuropsychiatric disorders now. There is no diagnostic test for schizophrenia. There’s nothing in the blood, nothing in the x-rays, no known physical markers to say that someone has schizophrenia. All the doctors can do is talk to the person and talk to the family at length, using structured interviewing methods, standard lists of symptoms, their expertise and years of training, to figure out what the problem is. They have to rule out other diagnoses, make sure it isn’t a side effect of other drugs or other diseases, but schizophrenia is often the diagnosis given because it is all that is left after everything else is ruled out.

Schizophrenia is a problem of the mind—it’s a problem of thoughts, of perceiving, of interpreting and interacting with the world. It’s not a muscular problem, it’s not a nerve problem, it’s not a visual or auditory problem. We can’t take an EEG and check mental function the way we can do an EKG and check heart function. So in schizophrenia research, we are looking for the underlying physical problem—or more likely, a network of problems. We have to look in the brain, how it’s formed and how it responds, to find clues as to what’s going wrong. We look at the chemistry and the physiology of the brain, at the signals we can measure, to see both how a normal brain communicates internally and what goes wrong in schizophrenia.

The brain is formed and develops through a complex interplay between the genetic code and the environment, broadly speaking. When looking for what might be going wrong in schizophrenia, genetics holds a clue because there are families that have more members with schizophrenia than the general population usually does. Something is being inherited that makes people in that family more likely to develop schizophrenia. However, all the work to date makes it clear there is no single gene that causes schizophrenia, and the search for genetic influences that correlate with being more or less likely to develop schizophrenia is continuing. In this Café we will review some of the genetic findings in schizophrenia and the novel methods being used to combine genetic information with other brain measures to tease apart what schizophrenia really is.

About the Presenter

Jessica Turner

What I enjoy is thinking new thoughts. What I enjoy about being a scientist is constantly being faced with new ideas, new concepts, new ways of thinking about things. My daily job is never the “same ol’, same ol’”—it’s something different every few hours, every day. I like reading science fiction because it shows us a world that isn’t, but maybe could be, going in a new direction, putting ideas together in novel ways. Working in scientific research is like that—half the work is asking, what if we try doing it THIS way, instead of that? What if what’s really going on is something else entirely, how would we know? As soon as we think we know the answer to one question, a new question is already waiting, a new method has been developed that we can use, or a new finding has been identified that we need to take into account. It’s never boring—it can be frustrating, but never boring.

I was not at all scientific as a kid; I never took things apart, didn’t play much with Legos, and the microscope a well-meaning grandparent gave me one year sat gathering dust. If you were looking for me, I’d be the one with my nose in yet another book. I did well in school and enjoyed math a lot, but had no idea what I wanted to do as an adult. (My first career choice as a child—astronaut—was unfortunately right out due to my poor eyesight and poorer coordination.) I picked my majors in college around both psychology because it seemed such an important, but messy, field—figuring out why humans are what they are—and math because it was so beautiful and precise, making symbols do what they were supposed to do.

My career has not been a clear, predictable path from college to grad school to post-doctoral researcher to tenure-track professor. I’ve changed fields a number of times so far, and probably will continue to do so as long as I can keep learning new things and following new paths. A lot of people say “Follow your dream,” and I always found that frustrating, since I didn’t have a dream. I didn’t have a passion or something I was really committed to. I just liked to keep trying new things just for the novelty of it.

Right up until my senior year in college I kept my options open, sending out resumes and interviewing with a variety of companies for jobs after college, at the same time that I was sending out graduate school applications to experimental psychology departments around the country. I started in grad school thinking I wanted to learn how people see, how the brain turns neural signals into conscious perception of the outside world, so we could build robots who can do the same thing. It’s still a fascinating and unsolved problem!

But I moved from that into neuroscience, and working in my first job after my PhD, I was able to start doing imaging of the human brain. Being able to see someone’s brain live and in action—being able to see my own brain!—was unbelievable, and I was hooked into cognitive neuroscience. How does the brain do what it does? How do we know? (What makes a sunset beautiful?) How do we even phrase the question, teasing it apart so we can start to answer it with the tools we have available?

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