ABSTRACT
The formation of a mature human brain involves genetic and environmental factors which together result in a neural machinery that operates in an holistic fashion in consciousness. Schizophrenia afflicts at least one in every hundred of the population through-out the world and is responsible for one in three admissions into mental hospitals. Neurophysiologists investigate the problem at the systems level, such as trying to understand how the auditory system or the visual system operates. Neurons that are undergoing enhanced levels of electrical activity consume more glucose. It might be anticipated that these techniques of non-invasive brain imaging could be used in a relatively straightforward way to determine those areas of the brain that are producing the distortions of consciousness that occur in the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics. The discrepancy between the approaches of P. E. Roland and S. M. Kosslyn are further brought out in recent experiments. Verbal hallucinations are the most common abnormality of consciousness in the paranoid schizophrenic brain.
