Schizophrenia is pretty massively horrible. Two decades ago, a behavioral geneticist told me not to use “schizophrenic” in the common but medically wrong sense of “having two different personalities”—people with schizophrenia and their loved ones have enough problems without you confusing other people. I was going to reply snarkily, but then I realized she was right.
So why doesn’t natural selection get rid of schizophrenia for us? One theory that has been around for a while is that the relatives of schizophrenics may tend to have some advantages, especially in creativity.
A new study of Danish youth finds that future schizophrenics tend to be good in language classes and bad in math classes.
The contrast was most striking for schizophrenia polygenic risk: individuals with high genetic risk for schizophrenia were very good in language but bad in math and those with lower schizophrenia risk showed the opposite pattern. We replicate this in an independent cohort (TEDS)
— Veera Rajagopal (@doctorveera) January 10, 2023
We found that individuals with genetic tendencies to perform poorly in math but better in the language in school, more often chose a career that requires high creativity skills (writing, acting, singing, dancing etc.) pic.twitter.com/r4N7sRvB6N
— Veera Rajagopal (@doctorveera) January 10, 2023
