Diminished Capacity

Many researchers think the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia reflect a physical deterioration of the victim’s brain. Now comes a new study from Harvard that strengthens that theory. Magnetic-resonance imaging of 15 schizophrenic and 15 normal men shows that the former have less gray matter in the left temporal lobe, a region believed to be important to language processing. The degree of shrinkage matched the severity of thought disorder — implying that while a cure for the disease is nowhere close, scientists may at least be zeroing in on the cause.