Sometime in my senior year of high school, I started to see things. Don't get me wrong, I've hallucinated before, usually while falling asleep--those are hypnogogic hallucinations. This time the things I saw stayed around.
Sitting in the well-lit, mostly white room of my calculus class, I became distracted by a little paramecium floating down the wall. I found that I could control it by moving my eyes, but only so much.
It bothered me until this week, when I learned that the vitreous humor or fluid in our eyes doesn't get exchanged like the fluid in the rest of our body. Dead cell bodies can become trapped in our field of vision, staying there for a long time. I find this knowledge very relieving. I sometimes questioned my sanity because I was constantly seeing things, which brings me to my next point.
I want to talk about the evolution of our genetic predisposition to a virus that may cause schizophrenia. First of all, I'm assuming that there is a viral cause for schizophrenia and that our genes predispose us to being more vulnerable to that virus. These assumptions seem to be born out by most of the empirical evidence. Secondly assume that this virus has been around for a long time. While this is harder to prove than my other assumptions, I think one can make the case for a lot of anecdotal evidence for schizophrenia's existence in the annals of history. Now assume that schizophrenia has been around for a very long time, meaning an evolutionarily significant amount of time. People who caught schizophrenia became delusional often believing they could perceive and affect forces greater than themselves. It is my belief that these people would have been elevated to a high position in their prehistoric tribes. They would have been seers and shamans; the link between the spiritual and the material. These people could have been more likely to pass their genes on, increasing the likelihood that the next generation will catch the virus too. To me, this virus is very cool, because of its use of biological as well as cultural means to ensure its survival. I am not saying that the virus was designed this way, or that it "intentionally" acts this way. I am merely observing that this is a very interesting vector for a virus to take.