Insane... or super sane?

As always, when I have a thought that entertains me, I like to blog about it.

Today, i am thinking about schizophrenia. 

My thoughts started with an article I read about "The Hollow Mask Illusion". The illusion is pretty straight forward. Our brains have trouble looking at a mask and telling if it is concave or convex, we can't discern if something is hollow based on a 2 dimensional view.

Take a look at the image to the left as an example. Is it hollow? 

I don't know actually. Google it if you're really curious. My mind quickly went elsewhere, and I don't really care about a fat Buddha face anyway.

What intrigues me about the article is the fact that schizophrenics are immune to this phenomenon. According to the article almost 99% of "regular' people were fooled by a hollow mask, where all the schizophrenics in the study were able to see through this illusion. In fact, schizophrenics aren't fooled by many optical illusions.

It used to be thought that schizophrenia was a fracturing of the mind into many pieces. Now it's believed that schizophrenia is actually a disorder of hyper-connectivity between areas of the brain.

If this new view is correct, then it brings a question to mind. If a schizophrenic is capable of seeing past an illusion (what might be thought of as a non-reality commonly perceived by the majority of the population), then are they really "crazy"?

Certainly sanity is not an easy standard, as it is as loosely defined as insanity. But, if someone with a mental "disorder" is capable of seeing a more real reality than someone without that disorder... I am inclined to at least entertain the fancy that perhaps the 99% of the population without schizophrenia may be the impaired group. 

Understand that schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder. It is characterized instead by "abnormal perceptions of reality." Auditory hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and disorganized speech patterns are also characteristic, but let me throw out a wilder proposition. 

If you read my blog about multiple dimensions of reality, then what about the possibility that a schizophrenic is a person in tune with a dimension we can not perceive? It's wild, I know. It's very improbably, but "what if" is a fun thing to think.

What if the auditory hallucinations were from a spiritual realm? Wouldn't that explain the fact that schizophrenics are often obsessed with religion, and the devil?  What if the paranoid delusions that some schizophrenics face are very much a reality in the world they can see... that we can not? What if the disorganized speech patterns are their brains trying to make sense of a reality that we as humans were not meant to experience in this life? What if that reality isn't just in their heads... but their brains are equipped for a level of perception beyond that of a normal human brain? (If communication between brain areas is enhanced, its sort of like a super power, a more efficient use of something we are told we don't exercise to it's full capacity.)

Probably not. In fact, I'll bet that there are 1000 to 1 case studies with anecdotal evidence contradicting anything I've written. But still, my brain tricks me a lot... and since my "sane" perception of reality can be fooled where an insane perception can not, I'll entertain the thought. At least on my blog.