RESEARCH FINDINGS: ABNORMAL “SELF” PERCEPTIONS RELATED TO THE STATE OF BRAIN HIPERACTIVATION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA.
In today’s session, our colleague Dr. Marta Hernández from the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valladolid, presented her new research results on personal abnormal perceptions or “self” in patients with schizophrenia.
These anomalous perceptions are alterations in the understanding of or relationship to oneself. They are prevalent from the early stages of schizophrenia and appear to remain stable throughout the course of the illness. In this work, they were evaluated using a self-applied inventory called IPASE (Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences) whose Spanish version is being validated by our research group SUCEDE, specifically by Dr. Hernández as part of her doctoral thesis under the direction of Prof. Vicente Molina.
Aiming a characterization of the biological basis of these anomalous experiences, Dr. Hernández has conducted a research in which 25 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed using the IPASE together with an electroencephalographic (EEG) that allows recording brain activity during the performance of an auditory task of attention and response to a target stimulus. We aimed to study the relationship in patients between their personal abnormal experiences and the possible disorganization of their brain activity. The measures of EEG activity selected for this study were: 1) spectral entropy, a measure of brain activity irregularity (or disorganization); and 2) the connectivity strength, a global measure based on graph theory that reports the strength and density of brain connections during the listening task. This study resulted in the alteration of the “self” being significantly associated with abnormal EEG measures, that is, a lower connectivity strength synchrony of brain activity in those patients with higher abnormal perceptions of “self”. These results suggest that a hyperactive and hypersynchronous brain may predispose to abnormal experiences of the self, such as hindering the pre-reflective experience of the proper origin of mental activity and the ability to identify oneself as a separate individual in the world.