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This article is relevant to the Genie case, outlining the many ways isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response - a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This response might've been biologically advantageous for our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for modern humans, the outcome is mostly harmful. A 1957 McGill University study, recreated in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, found that after only a matter of hours, people deprived of perceptual stimulation and meaningful human contact, started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests. In addition, subjects started hallucinating. The brain is used to processing large quantities of data, but in the absence of sensory input, Robbins states that "the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain's central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn't make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern." It tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

This article discusses the linguistics of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia diagnoses are typically made on one or more of the following 3 symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech. Traditionally, none of these symptoms are associated with language, but the article suggests linguistic dimensions to each. Another aspect of schizophrenia manifests as Formal Thought Disorder, which is clearly linked to language and speech production. The article goes on to provide a language profile for schizophrenia and discuss the linguistics of psychosis. As someone who has OCD, I've noticed many instances where an obsession or compulsion has strong linguistic elements. I found it interesting that this linguistic influence can be found in schizophrenia and it strongly suggests that what we believe about language's effects on cognition are true!

Schizophrenia is a very disabling psychiatric illness affecting about 2 to 3 million Americans. Contrary to popular perception, it has nothing to do with a "split personality." Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder involving "positive" and "negative" symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing visions that aren't real), delusions (fixed false beliefs), and disorganized thinking or speech. A recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Paul Grant, Aaron Beck, and their colleagues found that a modified version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a specific type of talk therapy, can produce clinically significant improvement in patients with schizophrenia. Importantly, significant improvement was seen in certain negative symptoms-apathy/avolition (lack of drive)-as well as in positive symptoms. These results are impressive, especially considering that the participants had been ill for an average of 18 years and suffered from severe symptoms. In this study, study participants were divided into two groups. One group received CBT in addition to "standard treatment," which included treatment with antipsychotic medications. The other group received standard treatment alone. CBT has been shown to be effective in a variety of psychiatric illnesses. It uses pragmatic techniques to help a person correct inaccurate or dysfunctional thoughts and emotions by promoting critical comparison of those thoughts with observable facts. For example, if a person believes that he/she is "doing absolutely nothing," one CBT technique would be to encourage the person to keep a detailed diary of daily activities. The therapist would later review this diary with the patient and facts would be compared to perceptions. Homework assignments would include strategies to increase productive activities. In the study mentioned above, the researchers focused CBT "on identifying and promoting concrete goals for improving quality of life and