Window magazine: 'WWU faculty and students explore the depths of the mind'

Jon Bale explains that the clear liquid he’s carefully dripping into a glass test tube in the laboratory contains neurotransmitters, the chemicals that allow brain cells to communicate with each other.

Working on a research project studying brain neurochemistry with Associate Professor of Psychology Janet Finlay, Bale is getting important research experience for a student who aspires to become a neurologist.

But Bale knows the real beneficiary of his long hours in the lab are people with schizophrenia, like those he once met while accompanying a doctor treating psychiatric patients.

Those troubled by hallucinations could find relief with medication, Bale saw. But medicine didn’t seem to alleviate other symptoms like extreme emotional detachment or disorientation even though, as he says, they can be just as debilitating.

Finlay is most interested in these so-called “cognitive” symptoms of the disease, which also include loss of short-term memory and attention deficits, all of which can make it impossible for people to live on their own. And those are the symptoms she’s targeting with her research.

Read the rest of the story on Window magazine online.