30 December 2014

Schizophrenia Illustrated With Sound

Start with John Cage's 4'33", a piece of music featuring rests for the entire duration of the piece.  Add Autotune.  The result, sporadic, faint noise triggered random sounds that almost seem like music when autotune tries to make sense of it.

This is the prevailing view of the mechanism of the hallucinations of schizophrenia, in which the pruning of neural connections during adolescence to a too thin level forced the brain to extrapolate from a too weak signal with insufficient noise processing and amplifies random noise into seemingly coherent messages using means that normally are used to simply fine tune noisy input.

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