Evaluation of my 1984 University Paper on Psychology

In 1984 toward my university degree in psychology, I wrote a paper for my senior level Abnormal Psychology seminar. Seminar classes were beyond taking tests. You should know enough by then to talk and write papers to present.

I was fascinated by the subject I’d chosen, essentially arguing we could learn a lot in studying synesthesia about schizophrenia, and vice versa. The research I uncovered and the comparisons between them seemed revelatory to me.

I presented it to our small class around a round table and when I finished there was silence. I was sitting next to our professor, Dr. Carmean. Eventually, the silence became unbearable, so I asked:

“Did I do something wrong? Am I that far off base?”

Dr. Carmean was staring down in silence at the table. I looked around at the others, everyone was avoiding my gaze. But they weren’t. They were simply lost in thought like our professor. Finally, he pulled himself together and said, “No. You did nothing wrong. I just never heard about this before.”

He went on to say that it was just unusual for an undgrad to find a seminal piece of research such as this. Many researchers look over their entire careers for something like this to spend their professional lives studying.

I looked around the room and everyone was nodding. Things loosened up then and they all had comments that they had never head of anything like this. I felt better. Having heard some of their papers already, I also realized they were comparing their papers to mine and they weren’t matching up to what I had come up with.

Hey, I was just lucky in stumbling on an interesting issue. One that in my research I could find no similar considerations about, just separated research on each topic. I just put them together. Though it bothered me that it was nearly a decade before I noticed anyone digging into what I had proposed doing that day.

Moving decades forward from that…

I had wanted to put it out to the world. But I did not want to do the research myself. I wished I had wanted to. Eventually, the internet allowed for that to happen. I shared it with people I talked to in newgroups before the World Wide Web appeared in the 1990s. Then in 2012, I put it into ebook form. More recently, I uploaded it to Academia.edu and Zenodo so it could be cited in other papers.

This week on a lark, I had an AI review it and its response made me laugh. At first, it came down I though, rather hard on me. So, I asked it to verify its attitude and what it came up with was almost comical. It all came across as, “Yeah, not bad for an undergrad, but not great either, and then…oh, yeah, OK, well, not bad at all, maybe.”

That is what I’m presenting here, now…

AI:

As a 1984 senior university psychology abnormal seminar paper (revised 2010):

What works well:

• The literature review is genuinely thorough for an undergraduate paper — tracing synesthesia scholarship from Pythagoras through 1970s dissertations, with real attention to how the field’s own terminology and theories shifted (sensory-apparatus theories → cortical/neuronal theories). The Davies (1974) conditioning study is used well as a pivot point: if a purely auditory stimulus can produce cortical activity in the visual cortex with no retinal involvement, that’s a legitimate piece of evidence for a cortical rather than peripheral explanation of synesthesia, and the author correctly identifies why that matters.

• The neural plasticity section (Bach-y-rita, Bennett et al., Lashley, Gerard) is decently marshaled and mostly stays within what the sources actually claim — synapse growth with sensory enrichment, cross-modal reorganization, brain regenerative capacity. This is solid supporting material for the broader thesis that the brain can route around “normal” channels without that being inherently pathological.

• The comparison between synesthesia and schizophrenia (a synesthete feels in control; a schizophrenic does not) is actually a fairly sharp distinction and a reasonable way to frame the core research question — using a controlled, non-pathological form of cross-modal integration as a comparative baseline for an uncontrolled one.

Where it’s shakier:

• The central causal claim — that studying synesthesia will meaningfully illuminate schizophrenia — is asserted more often than argued. The essay repeatedly says the two conditions “may have some cognitive and biochemical connections” or work through “similar levels of the neural system,” but the actual evidentiary bridge between the two literatures (separate research traditions, with no direct empirical overlap cited) is thin. It’s a plausible hypothesis, clearly labeled as speculative in places, but the paper sometimes states it with more confidence than the evidence supports.

• The Szasz material (mental illness as psychosocial/ethical label rather than medical fact) is an interesting inclusion but sits somewhat uneasily next to the paper’s own biological/dopamine-receptor argument a few pages earlier — the paper wants schizophrenia to be both a real neurobiological phenomenon and possibly a mislabeled “struggle with how to live,” without fully reconciling that tension.

• The personal anecdote (disorganized apartment → disorganized thoughts, resolved by tidying) is offered as “a clear example of what some schizophrenics go through,” which is a fairly large inferential leap from a common experience of environmental clutter reducing focus to the phenomenology of psychosis. It’s honest and vivid writing, but epistemically it’s doing more rhetorical than evidentiary work.

• The closing speculation about deliberately training children to be synesthetes as a healthier alternative to drugs/TV is imaginative but veers well past what any of the cited research would support — there’s no evidence base offered for whether synesthesia can be intentionally cultivated in this way, or that doing so would be desirable or safe.

Overall: stronger and more disciplined than the Field Theory [also on academia.edu and Zenodo] essay in its research grounding — it reads more like an actual literature review with a real, if underdeveloped, empirical hypothesis at its core. Its main weakness is the gap between “synesthesia and schizophrenia might share neural mechanisms” (a reasonable, testable idea) and the more confident rhetorical framing the paper sometimes gives it, plus a tendency to let personal reflection and speculation stand in for evidence in the paper’s back half. Given it was written by a senior for a seminar rather than submitted for publication, that’s a fairly normal profile for the genre — ambitious idea, real literature engagement, uneven follow-through on the speculative parts.

ME: And yet there is more research being done today in this area than ever before.

AI:

Worth checking rather than assuming — let me look at what’s actually out there now.

Validated user’s claim by uncovering recent interdisciplinary research…

You’re right, and it’s worth being specific about what’s actually out there now, because some of it directly validates the paper’s core instinct.

On synesthesia specifically: there’s a documented “hyperconnectivity hypothesis” of synesthesia now, with actual neuroimaging support — synesthetes show higher interregional correlations in brain thickness and increases in subcortical volume in regions like the cerebellum, amygdala, and hippocampal cortex, with results supporting a hypothesis that increased connectivity in visual and parietal regions facilitates intermodal perception. That’s essentially a modern, technically precise version of exactly what Murdock/Hayes was gesturing at with “extra neural pathways” and sensory plasticity back in 1984 — he just didn’t have fMRI or connectome analysis to show it. Frontiers

On the synesthesia–schizophrenia link specifically: there’s now a 2025 paper that does almost exactly what this seminar paper proposed 40 years earlier — a study examining brain regions associated with specific types of synesthesia and their neuroanatomical correlates, including statistical analysis of the association between brain region activation and clinical conditions like schizophrenia, autism, migraine, and others. That’s a striking validation of the paper’s central speculative move: using synesthesia as a comparative window into other conditions with atypical cross-modal or perceptual processing, schizophrenia included. Springer

On schizophrenia research generally: the field has genuinely exploded in volume. Schizophrenia genetics publications alone surged from 431 in 2020 to 1,645 in 2022, stabilizing above 900 annually in 2023-2024. There’s also real mechanistic progress the 1984 paper couldn’t have anticipated — notably a more refined synaptic hypothesis showing reduced synaptic vesicle density in schizophrenia and integrating neurodevelopmental and dopamine hypotheses with cortical excitation-inhibition balance, which is a much more precise descendant of the dopamine-receptor findings the original paper cited from Owen & Riley (1978). niharxiv

So the interesting thing is: the paper’s dopamine speculation, its instinct toward neural plasticity/extra pathways, and its central hypothesis that synesthesia could illuminate schizophrenia have all been at least partially borne out by directions research actually took — just with far more rigor, tooling, and specificity than a 1984 undergraduate could have marshaled.

Final AI comment that cracked me up a bit:

It’s a case where the intuition aged better than the evidence available to support it at the time.

Me again:

Hey, whatever…

LOL

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

JZ Murdock is a filmmaker and author based in Bremerton, Washington. His novel Death of Heaven received the New York City Big Book Award for Horror. And has little to do with religion. But the subtitle IS notable:

Nothing you know is true.

His film Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero has been lauded worldwide with many international festival awards. The film companion book is forthcoming.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Find more of Murdock’s work — fiction, film, and long-form political and psycho-social essays — at Murdockinations.com. JZMurdock.com | LgNProductions.com.