Impairment of functional connections between the motor and auditory systems of the brain could be the reason why some people with schizophrenia suffer auditory hallucinations, according to a study published this Thursday in the journal Plos One. This symptom is common in patients with certain mental disorders.
These hallucinations imply that the patient has difficulty recognizing his or her own thoughts. It also reduces your independence to care for yourself or work.
To reveal the root of these auditory hallucinations, a group of researchers from universities chinese have performed electroencephalograms on schizophrenia patients. 20 patients who hear voices and another 20 who do not suffer from this disorder participated in the study.
The study of the waves of the brain scans performed on these 40 patients revealed that those who suffer from auditory hallucinations present failures in functional connections. The motor and auditory systems of the brain.
On the one hand, they have observed that the brains of people who suffer from these hallucinations they do not suppress the internal sound of their own voice when they want to speak. In these cases, a signal known as a “corollary discharge” fails, which overrides the internal voice when trying to speak and which works correctly in people who do not hear voices.
At the same time they have discovered another process in which anomalies occur. When the patients With auditory hallucinations they prepare to pronounce a syllable, their brains not only do not suppress these internal sounds, but present greater internal reverberation of the syllable they plan to say.
Along these lines, they conclude that auditory hallucinations would be the result of abnormalities in two brain processes: a broken “corollary discharge” that fails to suppress self-generated sounds, and a “noisy reference copy” that causes the brain to hear sounds louder than it should. The authors propose to deepen their study to find new treatments.
