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Good morning friends. Many of you didn’t know about Schizophrenia. Some were not aware of what is this and how will it affect our life.

Schizophrenia blurs the line between inner and outer reality, by overstimulating a brain region involved in self-reflection and causing exaggerated focus on self.

The disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions that characterise the condition are caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions. Schizophrenia also involves an excess of connectivity between the so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves. "People normally suppress this default system when they perform challenging tasks. The patients with schizophrenia don't do this.

"We think this could help to explain the cognitive and psychological symptoms of schizophrenia." Research might lead to ways of predicting or monitoring individual patients' response to treatments for this mental illness, which occurs in about one percent of the population. Schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and first-degree relatives of patients (who share half their genes) are 10 times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. The identities of these genes and how they affect the brain are largely unknown.

The researchers were especially interested in the default system, a network of brain regions whose activity is suppressed when people perform demanding mental tasks. The medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, regions are associated with self-reflection and autobiographical memories and which become connected into a synchronously active network when the mind is allowed to wander. I

n the schizophrenia patients, the default system was both hyperactive and hyper connected during rest, and it remained so as they performed the memory tasks. The patients were less able than healthy control subjects to suppress the activity of this network during the task. The less the suppression and the greater the connectivity, the worse they performed on the hard memory task, and the more severe their clinical symptoms.