Scientists at New York University were performing an experiment on rats to study a schizophrenic trait of being unable to process competing streams of stimuli and identify relevant information when they stumbled on a discovery. Rats with brain lesions exhibit schizophrenic symptoms once they reach the equivalent maturity of a twenty-year-old human. Rats expressing these symptoms were not able to adjust to the experiment, but in their “adolescence,” even rats with lesions are able to adjust to the experiment normally. The surprising discovery was that rats with brain lesions which had been in the experiment as adolescents were still able to adapt to the experiment in their maturity, bypassing the onset of schizophrenic traits.
Read the full article here: Rat Study Suggests Cognitive Training in Adolescence Relieves Schizophrenia