I am here for scientific input on questions which interest me and not to stir up trouble. This is a juried study from a respected institution. It is very strange to see these people circling around me with suspicion. I am considered congenial and affable on all the tribes in which I am a member.
My interest here is purely scientific. The question of placebo, conditioned response, and anticipatory response has some bearing on my own interests which need not be brought to the table here, and which I will not allude to anymore since they seem to be so inflammatory.

I don't have a strong background in Cog Sci (in fact I belong to this tribe to keep a balance with my own tendency to give credence to what many might call "Woo" thinking), but I suspect that the answer to your last question may lie in the term:

'Neuroplasticity".

(people can feel free to shoot me down, on any point, that's why I join science tribes, to learn)

It's similar to the fallacy of the "nature" vs "nurture" debate, where analysis of a single function on a mechanistic level, precludes perception of an interaction within a "living", or "interactive" process.

I have a personal belief (not to be misconstrued as being backed by any study that can be conducted, or verified) that the potential within a human population for the conditions that we call 'schizophrenia', or even 'OCD' has a dual function within it's expression.

The last data that I saw (again, not personally a trained cog sci, and the article WAS in the mid-90's) is that both conditions, along with others, are a result of not a single trait or gene, but rather a combination of several, coupled with environmental conditions that increase the probability that such genes would find a negative expression.

A population (or individual) lacking any of the key gene sequences for such expression, would be incapable of lateral/creative thinking (in the case of schizophrenia), or of focused intent (in the case of OCD).

In laymans' terms, if you're not a "little bit crazy", you're insane.

A problem that we face, as we try to construct/reconstruct the evolutionary forces upon what we find as a current state within our species, and as individuals, is that we no longer really have access to a control population of people who are culturally and socially working within the original parameters within which specific traits emerged within the human bio-cultural matrix.

I can't point to information to back up my own personal theories. There are no longer any 'pure' tribal organizations of emergent human societies.

We can't watch the cultural forms anymore, we have our own historical cultural biases interfering with direct observation.

Ie. that the occasional emergence of an individual with a higher than normal occurrence of tendencies towards a specific occurrence of what we currently call 'disorders', a cultural mechanism would typically be in place.

"Put the crazy kids in shaman school, if we don't have a shaman in our tribal grouping, send them off to another tribe to learn the symbolic structures and awareness of role within community, that is needed for them to be functional. When situations that involve non-linear reactions with the environment emerge, we'll talk to them as a last resort."

That kind of thing wouldn't operate within an English language context.

Meh, it's a recurrent problem within the Cogsci tribe, approaches to specific questions start to break down when the answers require multi-disciplinary approaches.

And I probably don't know what I'm writing about.

Addenendum:

Medicine on it's own, without the use of what we often call "the placebo" effect, is not as efficient as active medicine with the "placebo" effect.

We may have actually lost a valuable tool in the translation of ritualized socio-culturally significant health practices, to the modern "just take the pill" paradigm.

Really, given the proven complexity of how our bodies and minds actually inter-relate, doesn't it seem kind of silly to reduce everything to a basic mechanistic basis?

In other words, perhaps the methodology of science may interfere with the proper application of the knowledge gained from that same method?