[Pixie_Dust]

My Schizophrenic friend tells me the difference between schizophrenics and normal people is that normal people can hear their own thoughts whilst schizophrenics can hear other peoples.

Serious point, maybe schizophrenic symptoms are cause by a disruption in REM sleep. As in the suffers are experiencing a waking dream. Some time back they did an experiement on students and kept them awake for days-and-nights on end. Eventually they couldn't tell the difference between the dreaming and the real world.

[kayodelycaon]

Many things can cause psychosis, so it's difficult to draw cause and effect out of the data.

I've experienced severe psychosis. For me, it was a merging of reality and imagination. I always knew what was real, but my brain couldn't filter and ignore the unreal. I would act as if imagination was reality though I knew it wasn't.

Several people I've talked to have said similar things.

I think of dreams as the result of rebooting the brain mid-defrag. It's chaotic in some way. My experiences with psychosis was far too structured and self-consistent to be a dream.

My theory is there is an active component to psychosis that doesn't fit in with REM sleep as a cause.

[wheelerof4te]

That's because their brains were rebooting when their body senses low activity.

Kind of like sleep function on laptops. Otherwise, the brain cells would "overheat".

[cududa]

This analogy is wrong on so many levels.

Human sleep would be more aptly related to garbage collection and indexing - neither of which occur when a laptop sleeps. When a computer overheats it throttles performance and sometimes shuts down.

[wheelerof4te]

When a brain overheats, you can easily lose consciousness and be forced to sleep. Wheather you like it or not.

So, not that wrong as you might think.