In a recent study published in the April Issue of Biological psychology, researchers at UT Austin and Yale University were able to replicate schizophrenic like symptoms in a neural network by hampering its ability to forget.  This research reinforces a hypothesis that schizophrenia can result when people lose the ability to forget unimportant information.  The neural network, which was designed to process natural language, responded to questions in a way that was very similar to how a schizophrenic might be expected to respond. From the article:

DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall. In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.In another instance, DISCERN began showing evidence of “derailment”-replying to requests for a specific memory with a jumble of dissociated sentences, abrupt digressions and constant leaps from the first- to the third-person and back again.

What’s striking is that a neural network is giving useful information about how the human mind might be functioning.  It is not hard to imagine how even an imperfect computer based model of the human mind, that only replicates partial aspects, could benefit research on mental illness.  One of the struggles of psychology is that you can only ever guess what is happening inside the brain.  The closest researchers can get to seeing what happens in the mind is through fMRI.  On the other hand, if a neural network can replicate a mental illness, then experimental parameters could be adjusted in ways that would be impossible with human test subjects.  Theoretically, key factors could be isolated through repeated experimentation without concern for harming the test subject.  Intentionally inducing schizophrenia in a healthy human is abhorrent, intentionally inducing schizophrenia in a computer is good science.