"Do the shelves have room for one more bonkers theory about how apes became human? You know the story: for millions of years we were big-brained but dull-witted hominids. Then, about 100,000 years ago, our brains were touched as if by a burning finger and we lit up with self-consciousness and creativity. We immediately started painting caves and worshipping gods, and became rational. The question is: what could have caused this abrupt change?

Well, here is a suggestion to wet your socks: the first humans were schizophrenic. A small band of smart apes lived by a lakeshore in east Africa on a diet rich in fats, which allowed their brains to grow very large. Then a genetic defect in fat metabolism led to one child having faulty brain connections; the signalling became slightly variable. The result was a brain prone to schizophrenia, psychopathy and mania, but also creativity, curiosity and ambition. As David Horrobin imagines it, this child with "a divine discontent with the way things were" spawned a family of proto-Medicis, brilliant and ruthless, who slaughtered their neighbours and spread out to rule the world.

Then comes a second part to the story. The founding of civilisation resulted in another big change in diet, initially to farmed grains and later to the high animal-fat consumption of modern times. Thus those individuals with schizoid genes (who tended to form the ruling classes) were no longer getting the right fats, so their brain-wiring really did start to go wrong. No longer were they simply touched with a little creative madness, but they had to be locked up in asylums."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/28/scienceandnature.medicalscience

Abraham Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond found LSD-25 mimics the schiz brain; they were looking for a model to use in research, tried literally everything and determined this was the closest. The single overwhelming symptom of which is the inability to distinguish delusion/fantasy from reality.

So as soon as people go on about some conspiracy theory but have no evidence (conspiracies certainly do exist but real ones have evidence) there's a good chance their head's full of crazy juice. Chemtrails are, imo a good diagnostic marker. I used to say fluoride but one scientist has pointed out what we add is not pure NaF but a byproducts of air pollution scrubbing towers and is highly contaminated with trace heavy metals which, ironically can induce schiz.

Horrobin's book was rather fascinating and made some interesting points:

1) He said when he heard somebody had murdered their mother he'd know right then they were schiz, no other mental illness does that. I think it's safe to say mass killings qualify here too.

2) It's strictly biochemical, patients are always asymptomatic during a fever and go back to being shiz when it's over.

3) It can be genetic and genius and madness are related.

Hoffer eventually came up with the hypothesis it was an oxidative byproduct of adrenaline, overexpressed in schiz patients who also have a predisposition to a highly oxidative biochemistry. Horrobin identified 4 genes required for this.

These biochemical and genetic aberrations are the fine line between genius and madness: if you carry the COM4T gene it's like having a faster clock rate on a CPU, twice as fast, but if you also carry genes that downregulate antioxidants, well, here comes the crazy juice - adrenochrome, androlutein and other oxidative byproducts.

The key for Hoffer was a case where a young boy in Arizona took a hit from an early asthma puffer (adrenaline) and became instantly and very profoundly schiz, which lasted 3 weeks. Upon analysis the puffer had oxidized and turned pink and had become adrenochrome. Hoffer tried it and knew that was the one, it was like LSD but way nastier and with a depressive hangover that lasted weeks and concluded this was the source of both schiz and bipolar, which are exactly the same except bipolar has a depressive cycle following mania schiz doesn't have.

There was a meme running around saying something like a woman's mind is like having 80 browser tabs open at once and a few people said oh yes, it's like that. If you look up "racing thoughts" in Wiki you'll see that's a symptom of mania. Another symptom of that disorder is rejection of authority so god help you if you try to explain this to them, posting alike to that page results in accusations of mansplaining and "you can't know what it's like to have a womans brain". Oy.

So Hoffer concluded pellagra, a B3 deficiency was the source of most schiz or rather schiz and pellagra were the same thing as doses of niacin fixed both and pellagra was characterized by symptoms referred to as the "3 D's": dementia, dermatitis and death, the dementia today we call schiz. One thing we learned from the Pellagra outbreak in the US was women get it twice as often as estrogen seems to attenuate conversion of tryptophan to niacin, hence a biochemical explanation of the "all women are crazy" idea.

Hoffer was certainly qualified, until recently the clinical test for schiz was the HOD - Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic - he lucked out by being a biochem guy who later became a doctor then a shrink and investigated the biochemical origins of the disease. He's gone on record as saying if we increased the amount of niacin we add to flour fo 4 mg to 40mg per slice of bread we could eliminate 90% of schiz, currently at 1.1% of the IS population (2X higher in Ireland and the former Yugoslavia) and this article blames low level or "subclinical" pellagra for the shooting outbreaks in the US where there are 9 guns per 10 households:

http://hartkeisonline.com/2012/08/24/is-pellagra-the-root-cause-of-violent-shooting-rampages/

I used to read a lot of scifi, the biochemical origin of mental disease is even more fascinating.

Horrobin's book is excerpted here: http://rs79.vrx.net/works/books/diet/Bionutrition/refs/madness/

Harry Foster wrote up a good case for it here: http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020185.Foster.Schizophrenia.pdf

and Hoffer's papers and 13 books explain the development and remediation of it rather well.

So... the origin of religion? That's sorta Horrobin's central thesis.

Pellagra made itself a problem in the early 1900's when industrial processing of grain caused the niacin to oxidize and become inert which is why we "enrich" all wheat flour today. Recall the domestication of grain occurred right about the time Judaism showed up. Seeing burning bushes and guys walking on water? Try eating less rancid grain and more liver. It might not be a coincidence that certain elements of kosher diet remediate schiz: chopped liver is one of the highest sources of dietary niacin, whose methyl group acceptors act like a sponge soaking up recursors to adrenaline while the high C content of onions (same as an orange) and "bitter herb" (wolfsbane) prevent the oxidation of any adrenaline that was formed.

Our traditional diet of fish a levels also prevented this and the above is pretty much a recipe for life away from a shoreline, ie wandering in a desert for a lone time; since heat, light and air oxidizes the oils in grain the same way industrial processing kills the antioxidant Vit E in the germ and niacin as well it's a pretty save bet this has a lot to do with it.