This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Martin R. Cohen, MD
UHS/The Chicago Medical School Veterans Administration Medical Center 3333 Green Bay Rd North Chicago, IL 60064-3095

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1991;48(4):379.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Having a newly developed outsider's interest in understanding human cognition, I was attracted to the recent review by Braff and Geyer.¹ I noted the authors' comparison of the development of testable hypotheses of attentional deficits in schizophrenia and the development of appropriate animal models of the specific behavioral changes exhibited by patients with schizophrenia with recent advancements in molecular biology. I thought of the George Winokur aphorism, "if only it were true."

If we lack the discipline to prevent comparisons of our work with the successes of molecular biology, at least our hypotheses and animal models should reflect clear, disciplined thinking. Braff and Geyer describe clinical studies demonstrating that patients with schizophrenia compared with controls demonstrate an "inhibitory failure" or a loss of sensorimotor gating functions. They note that "The effects of antipsychotic medication were viewed as possible confounds in the observed pattern of results... . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?