Lyon (1999) explains that among persons who do not
have schizophrenia, the auditory evoked response to the
second of two paired stimuli is significantly lower than the
response to the first. Persons with schizophrenia possess a
deficit in this sensory gating mechanism so that their
response to the second stimulus is significantly greater than
normal. It is suggested that this deficient inhibitory gating
mechanism impairs schizophrenic individuals’ ability to
filter out distracting environmental noise or sound and
hence contributes to impaired attention and processing of
sensory stimuli.