Ultimately, the goal of the work I contributed to in my Master’s thesis (1996) was to find a new computational technique for examining 3-D images. With it, psychiatrists would be able to detect variations in in the structure of human brains (in something called their “torsion”) and identify schizophrenics without having to dissect their heads post mortem, when treatment of the condition is academic.

I turned a mathematical method into some computer programs. with a view to chopping up volumes of human brain from MRI scans. Although my short project was promising, when I finished it I was so much in debt that I couldn’t afford to go back to Oxford to do a PhD continuing what I’d started. (Yes, I know they call them “DPhil”s there.) I got a job instead—a terrible one as it turned out.

About half-an-hour ago I turned on a radio programme (randomly) to find out that the relevant research group in Oxford now had a method for making this particular comparison. They had applied it to normals and schizophrenics and found…

…that there is no significant difference between our brains and theirs.

(You can decide for yourself which of the two populations I belong to.)