[andbberger]

There is a fascinating Bayesian explanation for schizophrenia: the story goes that schizophrenic people have a much sharper prior/posterior than non-schizophrenic people, which makes it more difficult for them to correct their internal models when the environment diverges from predictions. Which causes them to drift off into their own realities.

For example, if you run the rubber hand experiment with non-schizophrenic people, even if you don't stroke their hand and the rubber hand at the exact same time (say the timing offset is gaussian with standard deviation sigma), with enough repeated exposures to the stimuli they will recognize the rubber hand as their own. In contrast, if you repeat the same experiment with schizophrenic people, it takes a smaller standard deviation or substantially more trials to have them recognize the rubber hand as their own.

I wish I had the references lying around, but I dug into the literature for this a few years back and found this hypothesis to be surprisingly well supported.