Bridging the gap between genes and language deficits in schizophrenia: an oscillopathic approach

Murphy, Elliot; Benítez‐Burraco, Antonio

doi:10.1101/043547

Cited by 10 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 288 publications

(210 reference statements)

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“…This α rhythm, which synchronizes distant cortical regions, is involved in lexical decision making and contributes to the embedding of γ rhythms generated crosscortically in order to yield intermodular set formation during language processing [see Murphy, 2015, for details]. This rhythmic activity is found to be altered in SZ during lexical and sentence processing [Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016a].…”

Section: Sz and (The Evolution Of) Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As noted in the previous section, in schizophrenics a reduced γ activity is observed at frontal sites during semantic tasks. Likewise, higher cross-frequency coupling with occipital α is usually detected [Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016a].…”

Section: Sz and (The Evolution Of) Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Building on this hypothesis, in our previous work we showed that the complex pathophysiology of some human cognitive diseases that entail problems with language includes an abnormal presentation of domesticated features and can be, at least in part, linked to an atypical manifestation of the domestication syndrome [Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016a]. Specifically, we discussed how patients suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a plethora of distinctive behavioral, neurological, and physical anomalies, including dysmorphic features, apparently opposite to the "domesticated" traits observed in typically developing (TD) individuals .…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In our previous work we have shown that this abnormal mode of processing language can be specifically drawn back to an abnormal, distinctive oscillatory profile of the brain during language computation [Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016a]. Also, we have discussed how candidates for SZ are overrepresented among the genes believed to be involved in the evolution of our language readiness, that is, our species-specific ability to learn and use languages [Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco, 2014a, b;Benítez-Burraco and Boeckx, 2015;Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016a].…”

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confidence: 99%

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Schizophrenia and Human Self-Domestication: An Evolutionary Linguistics Approach

et al. 2017

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Schizophrenia (SZ) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that entails social and cognitive deficits, including marked language problems. Its complex multifactorial etiopathogenesis, including genetic and environmental factors, is still widely uncertain. SZ incidence has always been high and quite stable in human populations, across time and regardless of cultural implications, for unclear reasons. It has been hypothesized that SZ pathophysiology may involve the biological components that changed during the recent human evolutionary history, and led to our distinctive mode of cognition, which includes language skills. In this paper we explore this hypothesis, focusing on the self-domestication of the human species. This has been claimed to account for many human-specific distinctive traits, including aspects of our behavior and cognition, and to favor the emergence of complex languages through cultural evolution. The “domestication syndrome” in mammals comprises the constellation of traits exhibited by domesticated strains, seemingly resulting from the hypofunction of the neural crest. It is our intention to show that people with SZ exhibit more marked domesticated traits at the morphological, physiological, and behavioral levels. We also show that genes involved in domestication and neural crest development and function comprise nearly 20% of SZ candidates, most of which exhibit altered expression profiles in the brain of SZ patients, specifically in areas involved in language processing. Based on these observations, we conclude that SZ may represent an abnormal ontogenetic itinerary for the human faculty of language, resulting, at least in part, from changes in genes important for the domestication syndrome and primarily involving the neural crest.

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Section: Sz and (The Evolution Of) Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sz and (The Evolution Of) Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Schizophrenia and Human Self-Domestication: An Evolutionary Linguistics Approach

et al. 2017

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“…The second subset consists on strong candidates for language evolution, as compiled by Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco (2014a;2014b) and Benítez-Burraco and Boeckx (2015). These are genes involved in the globularization of the human skull/brain and the cognitive changes accounting for our species-specific ability to learn and use languages (aka our language-readiness), and fulfil the following criteria: they have changed (and/or interact with genes that have changed) after our split from Neanderthals/Denisovans (including changes in their coding regions and/or their epigenetic profile); they play some known role in brain development, regionalization, wiring, and/or function; and/or they are candidates for language dysfunction in broad cognitive disorders, particularly, ASD and schizophrenia (SZ) (see Benítez-Burraco and Murphy, 2016;Murphy and Benítez-Burraco, 2016; 2017 for details about their role in language processing).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robust candidates for language development and evolution are significantly dysregulated in the blood of people with Williams syndrome

Benítez‐Burraco

Kimura

2018

Preprint

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Williams syndrome (WS) is a clinical condition entailing cognitive deficits and with an uneven language profile, which has been object of intense inquiry over the last decades. Although WS results from the hemideletion of around two dozens of genes in chromosome 7, no gene has been yet probed to account for, or contribute significantly to, the language problems exhibited by the affected people. In this paper we show that robust candidates for language disorder and for language evolution in the species, located outside the hemideleted region, are up-or downregulated in the blood of subjects with WS. Most of these genes play a role in the development and function of brain areas involved in language processing, which exhibit structural and functional anomalies in people with the condition. Overall, these genes emerge as robust candidates for language dysfunction in WS.

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Single and Cross-Disorder Detection for Autism and Schizophrenia

et al. 2021

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Detection of mental disorders from textual input is an emerging field for applied machine and deep learning methods. Here, we explore the limits of automated detection of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ). We compared the performance of: (1) dedicated diagnostic tools that involve collecting textual data, (2) automated methods applied to the data gathered by these tools, and (3) psychiatrists. Our article tests the effectiveness of several baseline approaches, such as bag of words and dictionary-based vectors, followed by a machine learning model. We employed two more refined Sentic text representations using affective features and concept-level analysis on texts. Further, we applied selected state-of-the-art deep learning methods for text representation and inference, as well as experimented with transfer and zero-shot learning. Finally, we also explored few-shot methods dedicated to low data size scenarios, which is a typical problem for the clinical setting. The best breed of automated methods outperformed human raters (psychiatrists). Cross-dataset approaches turned out to be useful (only from SCZ to ASD) despite different data types. The few-shot learning methods revealed promising results on the SCZ dataset. However, more effort is needed to explore the approaches to efficiently training models, given the very limited amounts of labeled clinical data. Psychiatry is one of the few medical fields in which the diagnosis of most disorders is based on the subjective assessment of a psychiatrist. Therefore, the introduction of objective tools supporting diagnostics seems to be pivotal. This paper is a step in this direction.

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Bridging the gap between genes and language deficits in schizophrenia: an oscillopathic approach

Cited by 10 publications

References 288 publications

Schizophrenia and Human Self-Domestication: An Evolutionary Linguistics Approach

Schizophrenia and Human Self-Domestication: An Evolutionary Linguistics Approach

Robust candidates for language development and evolution are significantly dysregulated in the blood of people with Williams syndrome

Single and Cross-Disorder Detection for Autism and Schizophrenia

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