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Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that has been fascinating scientists for hundreds of years because we just don't understand it.
精神分裂症是一种严重的精神疾病，几百年来一直吸引着科学家们的关注，因为我们不理解。
But now we may have finally found the root of this devastating disorder, it starts when the brain is forming in the womb.
但现在我们可能最终发现了这种毁灭性疾病的根源，当大脑还在子宫内生长时，它就已经开始了。
Schizophrenia causes people to hallucinate, have a distorted view of reality, and experience extremely disordered thinking.
精神分裂症会使人产生幻觉，给人一个扭曲的现实，使人经历极其混乱的思维。
Brain function can be so badly affected that it's disabling.
大脑的功能可能受到严重影响，以致功能丧失。
Symptoms usually appear in adolescence or young adulthood and while some research has suggested a link between schizophrenia, drug usage, and trauma that has never been well understood.
症状通常出现在青春期或青年期，一些研究表明精神分裂症与药物及创伤之间存在联系，但这一联系并未得到很好的理解。
Because the symptoms appear later in life, researchers have long assumed the root cause is a mix of genetics, brain chemistry and environmental factors — environmental being your upbringing not the air you breathe.
由于症状出现在生命后期，研究人员一直认为其根本原因是遗传、大脑化学及环境因素的共同作用——环境是指你的养育环境，而不是你呼吸的空气。
In the past patients have long been misdiagnosed and mistreated, sometimes even being jailed.
在过去，精神分裂症病人长期被误诊和虐待，有时甚至遭到监禁。
But new technology has helped us understand what's really going on.
但是新技术帮助我们了解了这到底是怎么回事。
Medical imaging has shown that a patient with schizophrenia has a brain and Central Nervous System that look different than an unaffected patient's.
医学影像显示精神分裂症患者的大脑和中枢神经系统看起来与不受影响的病人不同。
There are hundreds of genetic mutations that might cause schizophrenia, but scans all show affected brains share the same "faulty genomic pathway."
有数百种基因突变可能导致精神分裂症，但扫描显示所有受影响的大脑都有相同的“错误基因组通路”。
It's clear from mounting evidence that schizophrenia is a brain disease.
越来越多的证据表明，精神分裂症是一种脑部疾病。
Armed with this new information, researchers turned to consider how that one pathway can be consistently faulty among so many patients.
有了这一新的信息，研究人员转而考虑这一通路在众多患者中的一致性。
And they used a little mad-science-sounding technique: they grew mini-brain structures in a lab.
他们使用了一种疯狂的科学探测技术：他们在实验室里培育了微型大脑结构。
Specifically, they grew cerebral organoids, recreating the first phases of human brain development, using skin cells from test subjects.
具体地说，他们利用受试者的皮肤细胞，培育脑类器官，再造人类大脑发展的第一阶段。
Four of these subjects had schizophrenia and three did not.
四个受试者患有精神分裂症，三个没有。
The cells grew into tiny organs that mimicked brains in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
这些细胞成长为微型器官，模仿了怀孕前12周内大脑的发育过程。
And the mini-brains grown from schizophrenic patients showed critical malformations in the cortex, the part of the brain that controls things like memory, attention, and cognition.
而来自精神分裂症患者的微型大脑显示，大脑皮层出现关键性畸形，大脑的这一区域控制了记忆、注意力以及认知等方面。
The cells that become neurons weren't distributed normally.
变成神经元的细胞分布失常。
The mini-brains showed there would be too few mature neurons in the cortex for normal functionality when the fetus became a full grown adult.
迷你大脑表明，当胎儿长大成人时，大脑中正常功能的成熟神经元数量过少。
This results suggest that schizophrenia likely starts in the FIRST TRIMESTER.
这一结果表明，精神分裂症可能在人生的第一阶段就开始了。
The cells that develop into neurons don't connect the same way in a schizophrenic cortex as they do in an unaffected one.
那些发育成神经元的细胞在精神分裂症患者的大脑皮质中的联接方式与在未受影响的大脑皮质中的联接方式不同。
If your brain was a computer, a brain with schizophrenia would be "improperly wired."
如果你的大脑是一台电脑，那么患有精神分裂的大脑就是“连接不当”。
There would be only so much you could do from the outside to fix it, which is why schizophrenia is so hard to treat, and, it seems, impossible to prevent.
而你能从外部进行的干预并不多，这就是为什么精神分裂症是如此难以治疗，而且似乎无法预防的原因。
But knowledge is power and researchers are now starting to look at schizophrenia treatment with prenatal care, drugs, and supplements so brains have a better chance of forming with the right neural pathways.
但是知识就是力量，研究人员现在开始研究精神分裂症的治疗，包括产前护理、药物及补充剂，所以大脑形成正确的神经通路的机会增多了。
Thanks for watching and if you want more science in your day please subscribe.
谢谢收看，如果想获得更多的科学知识，请您订阅。
We're still learning about how our own brain works, check out Trace's video about the giant neurons that could explain where consciousness comes from,
我们仍在研究自己的大脑是如何运作的，看看特雷斯的视频，关于巨大的神经元，这可以解释意识的来源：
Fun fact: The first recorded case of schizophrenia was in 1550 BC in one of the oldest Egyptian medical texts, the Ebers Papyrus.
有趣的事实：关于精神分裂症的最早记录来源于公元前1550年一本埃及最古老的医学典籍，《埃伯斯纸莎草书》。
