TITLE

Can We Measure Delusions?

There might be a way—and if so, we could use it to detect and treat them in the earliest stages, before they become debilitating

DESCRIPTION

This is a complicated article focused around Karl Friston’s free energy principle as an explanation of how the brain processes all of the incoming sensations (and information) and then responds to adapt to the environment.   Using work from PET scans and MRI scans of schizophrenia, the Friston model attempts to explain how the structures of the brain and processing in the brain can lead to both positive and negative errors in thinking and hence create problems in thinking, cognition, hallucinations, and delusions: schizophrenia  “The free-energy principle describes the brain as a machine whose goal is to predict what’s happening in the environment. Because it is predicting (and these predictions can be wrong), it is prone to statistical errors like false positives and false negatives.”  The background of the article is a narration of a case of a woman who begins to have serious delusions after her partner dies.  The grief reaction triggered her psychotic delusions; she had had a schizophrenia episode 20 years earlier.  The article speculates how the intense grief caused her brain processing to no longer respond to the existing model of the actual world (life without her partner) given the loss and major change in that world (how it functioned when the partner was alive).  The article speculates about “measuring” delusions the way medicine measures physical problems and then find prevention and a “cure”.

SOURCE

Scientific American, March 19, 2018, by Daniel Barron

LINK TO RESOURCE

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-we-measure-delusions/

(Tiny URL)  http://tinyurl.com/yad4hn6e

CLASS DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

•First discuss the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the symptoms.   How can these be measured?

•How does Friston’s Model of Free Energy explain schizophrenia?

•Can the Model provide empirically based measurements predictions  of symptoms through brain scans?   Are there other types of studies to support his model?

•If the article is overly complex for the class, focus on the case of Rose discussed in the beginning and end of the article as an excellent narrative of how a major life event (death, loss and grief) can as as a precipitant for her schizophrenic delusions.