>>13651076atypical concentrations of glutamate and dopamine are probably downstream effects of most of the root causes of schizophrenia. there's likely a class of more fundamental problems, for various system design-based reasons, tend to converge towards effects that cascade into things like excessive glutamate and dopamine activity and improper
i think there may be a bit too much focus placed on neurotransmitters. the important thing isn't so much dopamine and glutamate but neurons that send and receive the dopamine and glutamate and the other actions those neurons perform and what actions they trigger in other neurons. each neuron is a complex computer in itself, and they're all communicating internally and externally through tons of different communication channels, and there are 100 billion of them
this leads to many serious cognitive downstream effects - the positive and negative symptoms - with one of the most severe possibly being chronically aberrant prediction errors. this may lead to many different prediction systems in the brain to work improperly - they may fail to predict things they normally should, and vice versa.
sensation of a thought that the system was "surprised" by = perception of foreign inner voice / thought insertion by evil government agency. see some random car that the system is surprised by = fear system jumps to concern about being targeted/gangstalked
so all the different causes may happen to lead to a malfunction in this critical system. those same causes may also disrupt other systems, or maybe that system's failure is the upstream cause of a lot of those, or both. regardless, it's clearly a pervasive cascading failure
a bandaid solution is to inhibit and stabilize the dopamine and glutamate, which antipsychotics do,, but it's an incredibly crude solution. it doesn't address the root issues, and it also inevitably fucks with all of the things that rely on dopamine and glutamate, leading to potentially worsened negative symptoms
