Synaptic Connections

The same person who hears voices and sees visions in the West is made to believe they are unwell, sick, and thus consequently medicated to the point where the individual loses their light; numbness takes over. Meanwhile, in cultures such as Latin America, the indigenous Ainu religion and Japanese religion of Shinto, and continental Eastern Asia (to name a few), the “symptoms” of the individual diagnosed schizophrenic in the West are now perceived as an essential spiritual magic worker, a gifted healer, a shaman who can hear and interpret divine messages in the Global South and East.

Many psychiatric disorders have been related to disturbances in synaptogenesis and subsequent plasticity. I’m curious—if we could see the synaptic connections of the mind of an individual who is declared a shaman if we’d see the same patterns or behaviors of synaptogenesis as that of an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia.

This project is a conceptual abstraction of a cultural contrast I’m highlighting between two hypothetical human beings exhibiting the same criteria of symptoms or characteristics, one diagnosed schizophrenic and one declared shaman, treated drastically differently by society depending on the surrounding culture.