Dysfunction in the brain’s ‘hub’ in the earliest stages of schizophrenia: “A new brain imaging study from the Institute of Psychiatry shows for the first time that the thalamus, the brain’s main sensory filter
or ‘hub’, is smaller than normal from the earliest stages of schizophrenia. The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry
in January, may explain why people with schizophrenia experience confusion during their illness.

The thalamus is the area where information is received and relayed to other areas of the brain. It is of particular interest in
schizophrenia because of the role it plays in processing information. The thalamus receives information via the senses, which is then
filtered and passed to the correct regions of the brain for processing. People with schizophrenia often have difficulties in processing
information properly and as a result may end up with an information overload in some areas of the brain.” EurekAlert

As people who have read some of my earlier comments know, I think some schizophrenia involves a primary information processing deficit…since I think it’s really a wastebasket term for a collection of disparate diseases. Because the study populations are, from this point of view, heterogeneous, it’s been difficult to find any important defining characteristics in most studies of “schizophrenics.” There will be “brain findings” in a subset of any schizophrenic population, I’m fond of saying. And it’s a further obfuscating factor that it’s difficult to find medication-naive schizophrenics in this day and age, and the medications used to treat psychosis have been such heavy-hitters that the brain may take a hit from them. If this finding about the thalamus is as universal as claimed, it could prove very important. The abstract of the article, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, is here.