a visual metaphor describing neural dynamics in schizophrenia视觉隐喻在精神分裂症神经动力学描述.pdfVIP

A Visual Metaphor Describing Neural Dynamics in Schizophrenia 1 2 Nico J. M. van Beveren , Lieuwe de Haan * 1 Erasmus University Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2 Department of Psychiatry, Academic Medical Center/de Meren, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract Background: In many scientific disciplines the use of a metaphor as an heuristic aid is not uncommon. A well known example in somatic medicine is the ‘defense army metaphor’ used to characterize the immune system. In fact, probably a large part of the everyday work of doctors consists of ‘translating’ scientific and clinical information (i.e. causes of disease, percentage of succes versus risk of side-effects) into information tailored to the needs and capacities of the individual patient. The ability to do so in an effective way is at least partly what makes a clinician a good communicator. Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder which affects approximately 1% of the population. Over the last two decades a large amount of molecular-biological, imaging and genetic data have been accumulated regarding the biological underpinnings of schizophrenia. However, it remains difficult to understand how the characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia such as hallucinations and delusions are related to disturbances on the molecular-biological level. In general, psychiatry seems to lack a conceptual framework with sufficient explanatory power to link the mental- and molecular-biological domains. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, we present an essay-like study in which we propose to use visualized concepts stemming from the theory on dynamical complex systems as a ‘visual metaphor’ to bridge the mental- and molecular- biological