r foot obsessively. Before drowning her children, she rarely spoke, according to her family. Police officers who responded to the crime said she appeared emotionless.
Paranoid schizophrenics become convinced of beliefs that are out of touch with reality, hear voices that aren't there, or see things which don't exist, except in their own minds (Begley, 2002, 44). Yates may have been paranoid as well as schizophrenic: it was recalled at trial that she had stood staring at cartoons her children were watching on television for a half-hour, and told the prison psychiatrist later that the cartoon characters had been talking to her and calling her a bad mother for feeding her children too much sugar.
Hallucinations have been traced to malfunctions in the brain using brain scans of schizophrenics undergoing hallucinations (Begley, 2002, 44). For instance, when a patient reported seeing dripping colors and severed heads, parts of the sensory cortex that process movement, color, and objects became active. Visual hallucinations are usually fragmentary, and the scenes portrayed in A Beautiful Mind are not true representations. Schizophrenics usually see just outlines, or figures without features. When patients hear voices, the auditory cortex and the language-processing areas of the brain become active, meaning that they are processing complex auditory, linguistic information, and not just noise. This means the voices are as real to the patients as those heard in conversation or over the radio.
During hallucinations, the hippocampus, amygdala, and the thalamus are all active, suggesting that hallucinations are packed with emotional power to make schizophrenics engage in bizarre activities, like Eric Williamson, a schizophrenic for 15 years, who was convinced someone wanted to poison him, so would only eat canned foods, or Chris Coles, who went to a deserted beach at night because voices told him to go and meet a friend to ap...