Diminished Capacity

Diminished Capacity

Many researchers think the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia reflect a physical deterioration of the victim's brain. Now comes a new study from Harvard that strengthens that theory. Magnetic-resonance imaging of 15 schizophrenic and 15 normal men shows that the former have less gray matter in the left temporal lobe, a region believed to be important to language processing. The degree of shrinkage matched the severity of thought disorder -- implying that while a cure for the disease is nowhere close, scientists may at least be zeroing in on the cause.

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