Schizophrenia - Motor Control

Professor David Lewis explains that schizophrenic individuals can have coordination problems, which may relate to impaired neural circuits.

In addition to the symptoms that we recognize clinically as schizophrenia, individuals with that disorder can also have problems with motor control. They have difficulties with moving their eyes to follow a moving object and in the actual initial recognition of the illness by Kraepelin, he described kind of an awkward clumsy behavior. So, while this is a well recognized disturbance in the illness, it is less well understood what actually are the underlying disturbances in the neural circuitry that give rise to these motor abnormalities. I think one of the open questions in schizophrenia now is, is there a conserved disturbance in neural circuitry that, by virtue of affecting different regions of the brain, can give rise to different symptoms of the disorder: the psychotic symptoms, the negative symptoms, or the impairments in cognition, and, perhaps as well, the disturbances in motor performance?