Psychotic Patients View 'Alice in Wonderland' Differently Than Others

It turns out that psychotic patients see Alice in Wonderland differently than a control group. Researchers using fMRI found that even first-episode psychotic patients processed information different from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

High-precision fMRI is often used in neuroscience to locate brain activity in response to stimuli. With psychotic patients, these experiments often look at chronically ill patients, and so the differences in brain activity shown in scans would be more obvious than most in real life. However, early psychosis is more difficult to detect.

In this latest study, the researchers came up with a creative solution to cause controls and patients to receive the same stimuli while their brains were being scan. Both groups watched the movie Alice in Wonderland.

The researchers used a 3-Tesla MRI device to scan the brains of 46 first-episode psychotic patients, which meant that they had had only one psychotic event, and 32 healthy controls, while watching the movie. The researchers found that significant differences could be seen in the precuneus region of the brain, which is an area associated with memory, visuospatial awareness, self-awareness, and aspects of consciousness.

"In this work, we attempted to determine whether a person is a first-episode psychosis patient or a healthy control subject just by looking at their brain activity recoded during movie viewing," said Eva Rikandi, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We found, that by monitoring activity in a region known as the precuneus we were able to distinguish patients from control subjects especially well. This would mean that the precuneus, a central hub for the integration of self- and episodic-memory-related information, plays an important role in this kind of information processing of psychotic patients."

The researchers had almost 80 percent classification accuracy using their methods. By better understanding different reactions, the researchers may be able to better understand how patients with psychosis process information in a different way.

The findings were presented at the 28^th ECNP Conference in Amsterdam.

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