"When people think of heredity in a colloquial sense, they think about the inheritance of unique features across generations: the peculiar shape of a father’s nose or the susceptibility to an unusual illness that runs through a family. But the conundrum that heredity addresses is really much more general: What is the nature of instruction that allows an organism to build a psyche, or a nose—any nose—in the first place? The C4-gene variant that contributes to schizophrenia is the same gene that, in all likelihood, is used by the brain to prune synapses and thus enable cognition, the tethering of thoughts to realities, and adaptive learning. Push the activity of the gene beyond some point, and Bleuler’s threads of association break; a mind-demolishing illness is unleashed. Swerve too far in the other direction, and we lose our capacity for adaptive learning; the blooming, buzzing confusions of childhood—its naïve, unshorn circuits—are retained. Our unique selves must live in some balanced state between overedited and underedited brain circuits, between overpruned and underpruned synapses.
One night in 1946, Rajesh came home from college with a riddle, a mathematical puzzle. The three younger brothers went at it, passing it back and forth like an arithmetic soccer ball. They were driven by the rivalry of siblings, the fragile pride of adolescence, the terror of failure in an unforgiving city. I imagine the three of them—twenty-two, sixteen, thirteen—each splayed in a corner of the pinched room, each spinning fantastical solutions, each attacking the problem with his distinctive strategy. My father: grim, purposeful, bullheaded, methodical, but lacking inspiration. Jagu: unconventional, oblique, but unfocussed. Rajesh: thorough, inspired, disciplined, often arrogant. Night fell, and the puzzle was still not solved. But, unlike his brothers, Rajesh stayed up all night. He paced the room, scribbling solutions and alternatives. By dawn, he had cracked it. He wrote the solution on four sheets of paper and left it by the feet of one of his brothers.
There is a trope in popular culture of the “crazy genius,” a mind split between madness and brilliance, oscillating between the two states at the throw of a single switch. But Rajesh had no switch. There was no split or oscillation, no pendulum. The magic and the mania were perfectly contiguous—bordering kingdoms requiring no passports. They were part of the same whole, indivisible. It is tempting to romanticize psychotic illness, so let me emphasize that the men and women with these mental disorders experience terrifying cognitive, social, and psychological disturbances that send gashes of devastation through their lives; I know this story as intimately as anyone."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/the-genetics-of-schizophrenia
So many questions here that are really core to neurogenetics: Are we poking at molecules that are getting in the way of some pure sense of who we are, or are we finding the courses of our unique individual capacities of consciousness?
What is our responsibility as scientists, biomedical researchers, in approaching and interpreting that?
FB: "“Genes,” he said, frowning.
“Is there a Bengali word?” I asked.
He searched his inner lexicon. There was no word—but perhaps he could find a substitute.
“Abhed,” he offered. I had never heard him use the term. It means “indivisible” or “impenetrable,” but it is also used loosely to denote “identity.” I marvelled at the choice; it was an echo chamber of a word."
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