Doctors use Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland to tell if you’re psychotic
Researchers from Aalto University can tell if you’re psychotic by making you watch Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. A certain Mad Hatter wouldn’t be happy.
Most other studies pool severely psychotic patients because the brain pattern differences are obvious. But the Finnish researchers found that their test can apply even to first-episode psychotic patients (i.e. those who had just one psychotic event)
A 3-Tesla MRI device scanned the brains of 32 mentally-healthy controls and 46 first-episode patients while watching the Tim Burton film. Researchers were able to pick out the psychotic patients by a difference in activity in the brain’s precuneus region. The region controls memory, self-awareness, visuo-spatial awareness and consciousness.
The study was presented at the 28th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Conference in Amsterdam. Lead researcher Eva Rikandi gave more details at the conference.
“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 recorded during movie viewing. 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.”
“We were able to achieve almost 80% classification accuracy using these methods. This is the first study which directly associates the beginnings of psychosis with the precuneus, so it is now important that much more research is done in this area” she continued.
The researchers hope that this approach can feed into earlier screening and better diagnosis of at-risk populations.
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