Hallucinations experienced by patients who are prone to psychosis due to certain diseases such as schizophrenia can often times get in the way of everyday light and often times are terrifying. But what if these hallucinations could aid these patients in certain tasks? What if being prone to hallucinations aided in your ability to "connect the dots" during recall and image recognition?
Vision is a constructive process, meaning that we absorb many different cues and signals with our eyes from our environment and we mesh them together in an expected series of images to be processed by the brain. It is assumed that hallucinations occur in the event that people who are prone to hallucination, heavily rely on prior knowledge and past experience to construct these series of images from external cues to be processed by the brain. So theoretically, if someone prone to hallucination through psychosis was to recall certain information and "mesh" images and thoughts together, he or she would have an easier time doing so if bits of information were presented prior to the final task of recognition.
A team of researchers tested this by having 16 healthy volunteers (control group) and 18 volunteers who have been experiencing early psychosis symptoms(clinical group). The volunteers were presented with black and white images that either contained a person or didn't and participants were asked to respond. Then, the participants were presented with full-color images which a number of had been created with the template of the black and white image. The first set of pictures were presented again and responses were recorded again. The data showed that the group clinical group performed better the second time around, once they had certain information about the images circulating in their working memory, they were able to distinguish the presence of a person or not. The team expanded the study and found a positive correlation between task performance and a test of the person's psychosis proneness. And as stated by the author as more of a solidifying remark, "Taken together, these findings suggest that visual perception in people
prone to psychosis shows a shift towards the use of prior knowledge
rather than incoming sensory evidence."
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-study-offers-insight-emergence-hallucinations
I found this blog post really interesting because I had no idea that people undergoing active psychosis relied more heavily on the use of prior knowledge rather than incoming sensory information. I went ahead and read the article that the blog is based on, and found it fascinating how the article explained that “the process of psychosis may be understandable not as some major derangement of function but rather as an exaggeration of the normal process, with all of us having the mental apparatus that could lead us to see, hear, feel, taste and smell things that are not actually there.” I am really fascinated by things such as psychosis and hallucinations, and wonder what cognitive and biological factors cause them to come about.
ReplyDeleteThis article intrigued me, as I am very interested in psychotic symptoms involved in schizophrenia. In my opinion, this is a interesting and necessary way of thinking about this illness. Instead of trying to mask these symptoms by essentially sedating the patient with heavy medications, it could be greatly beneficial to understand how these symptoms effect the patient, thus finding a way to alter the symptoms to benefit the patient.
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