Scientists have developed a diagnostic test recognizing early signs of psychosis using Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie.
Psychosis is a mental health problem among people who perceive and interpret things differently that could lead to having hallucinations and delusions.
Mirror UK reports a study was presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Amsterdam. Conducted by researchers from Finland, this study aims to develop an effective psychosis treatment.
"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," said Eva Rikandi of Aalto University in Helsinki. "We found, that by monitoring activity in a region known as the precuneus, we were able to distinguish patients from control subjects especially well."
For the study, the team scanned the brains of 46 first-episode psychotic patients and 32 non-psychotic patients while watching the 2010 fantasy film. They found out that there are significant differences in the activities of the brain region associated with memory, self-awareness, visual and spatial awareness, and other aspects of consciousness.
"We were able to achieve almost 80 per cent classification accuracy using these methods," Rikandi added. "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 interesting question here is how patients with psychosis, even in their first episode, process information in a different way," said ENCP President-Elect Celso Arago, a Spanish professor. "Specifically how a movie such as Alice in Wonderland elicits the participation of different brain areas, and how that relate to the history of the person watching?" he asked.
"What we would like to know is if patients with psychosis might see this as more or less relevant to their own life than would healthy controls," he added.
Arago's questions encouraged researchers to conduct further studies since there might be differences if patients were shown films aside from the fantasy genre.
