I'm confused. The article says that creativity is associated with low thalamic D2 receptor density, and that the thalamus "filters" signals to the rest of the brain, so they speculate that diminished activity therein results in less filtering and more creativity, and schizophrenia is a more severe form of this. That's fine until you consider that antipsychotics work by blocking dopaminergic activity, which would exacerbate the pathology rather than repair it. My understanding was that dopamine is associated with increased dopamine receptor binding in the prefrontal cortex (which is consistent with the observed mechanism of action for antipsychotics), and the lower thalamus receptor densities were simply due to downregulation caused by the excessive endogenous dopamine. Can someone with more expertise clarify?
"That's fine until you consider that antipsychotics work by blocking dopaminergic activity, which would exacerbate the pathology rather than repair it."
IIRC blocking dopamine causes the brain to produce more D2 receptors to compensate.
