Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

Completely anectodal:

Right after the time I was diagnosed (~36), I started to become weirdly good at some stuff.

Music, for example. I've been playing for almost two decades and couldn't progress after a certain level. This changed almost overnight, and I started to learn new instruments very quickly (now I play guitar, bass, drums and piano). I'm not a genius at them, it's not what I'm trying to say. It's just that the pace at which I learn is very different from when I was younger, I can do things I never imagined being able to do.

Somehow, I also acquired some ambidextry. This might be due to learning the instruments. I now can write with both hands (not at the same time, dominant hand is still faster and more acurate). I also developed a second, completely different handwriting (now I have two "fonts" I can use naturally).

I got worse at dealing with people. Everyone seems to be in a haze from my point of view, and it discourages any kind of meaningful relationship. I can pretend though.

I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component is involved in all of this (my father was ambidextrous though, but he acquired it in childhood), it seems purely psychological. I am also skeptical about the stereotypical triggers people often associate schizophrenia to.

Last year I was reading about Havana Syndrome. That was the thing that most resonated with the kinds of psychotic events I had. Weird sounds and voices that seem to come from nowhere, dizziness, balance problems, insomnia, headaches. By the time I got to a doctor, these effects were not there anymore (they last a very short time, at least for me). I was diagnosed by describing them to the psychiatrist. Since the first episode, it has happened again a handful of times. I have learned since that Havana syndrome is not a thing anymore, but there are no official explanations other than "it's likely to be psychogenic". I also wouldn't qualify for it (apparently, only diplomats and spies had it).

Could be age related. I could never play a musical instrument until my mid thirties. Nobody in my family could. My wife found a Ukulele which was left on the side of the road and which was in good condition and took it home. I started playing just randomly tugging strings to understand the sounds and I kept doing that maybe 10 to 30 mins a day for about 2 months and the tunes became less and less random and now I can improvise full 1 to 2 minute melodies on the spot with multiple strings.

I don't need to plan the melody ahead of time I just pick a few notes that go well together then I pick some starting notes and I just intuitively know how to join them together into a full piece. It's like when I play some notes, my fingers themselves resist certain bad notes and whatever note I end up choosing (high pitch or low pitch) seems to work out every time.

> I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component

Something can still be (weakly or strongly) genetic, but not inherited in any direct way. I.e. due to a particular mix of genes.

I had a guitar since I was 16, and never gave up trying to learn. I reached a plateau very quickly (knew some chords, simple songs), and could never go past it. I then spent almost 20 years in that plateau.

Then, suddenly, it all started to click. I was reharmonizing, writing my own lines, improvising, soloing. It was uncanny. I moved to other instruments at similar speed, stuff I never played before. It became so easy.

I heard many times that once you age, you lose some ability to learn music. What made this experience so jarring was that I experienced the exact opposite.

Maybe this thing that you have to start young is all bullshit (probably what's going on here), and before I had some kind of block. I can't explain what that block was though.

The kinds of genetic claims people usually make about schizophrenia are of the hereditary kind (including the post article), not random mutations.

I attribute this to how the illness is researched: finding a genetic factor would be a major breakthrough, so lots of people do studies on that, and eventually force their way into a discovery that represents a narrow subset of the illness but ultimately fails to explain it. It's all over the place.

This makes me extra skeptic regarding the validity of some of these studies.

If you scan Wikipedia's "Famous people with schizophrenia" article, as in people whose talent was so exceptional that they could succeed despite their disadvantages, most of the people on the list are musicians.

Did the diagnosis perhaps relax some defensive structure in your mind which freed up an ability to tolerate the discomfort of actually identifying what you need to improve?

I don't know. It seems too vague of a description.

On the guitar, I did some identifying and learning.

On drums though, I just sat there and in a matter of months I was able to play to a lot of songs. I was doing polyrhythms, for example, before I knew what polyrhythms were.

Possibly, this is nothing extraordinary and fits the overall learning curve for the general population (I'm assuming lots of people do polyrhythms without knowing them). Which means that before the first episode, I was below that general curve of learning music (slower than everyone else would learn), then something changed right after such episode.

Since I'm on HN, let's use a computer analogy: I would describe it as upgrading a PC to new hardware, things felt smoother. The world of music (and arts in general) felt higher resolution, faster, more responsive to my actions.

Yeah, I was referring to a mix of genes not mutation.

Some things happen only with the right set of genes, which don’t come together through any obvious combination of parents or ancestors and may also be unlikely to pass on as a set to children too.

Even more complicated, there may be alternative genes, making identifying which genes are a factor and which are not very difficult.

But I am just pointing out that most things have a genetic pattern behind them, since all our features do.

But it appears making any progress there has been difficult.

> But I am just pointing out that most things have a genetic pattern behind them, since all our features do.

I guess I'm genetically predisposed to not give much credit to genetics then. Nothing you can do about it, I will always be skeptical regarding these sorts of claims.