A new study that came out today showed that there are deficits in the audio and touch processing parts of the brains of schizophrenics. We don’t “adapt” to repeated novel stimulation by reducing our attention to it. In other words, nothing gets filtered out, not even after we get used to the sound. Same thing with touch.
Here’s their abstract:
Abstract
Atypical visual and somatosensory adaptation in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders
Neurophysiological investigations in patients with schizophrenia consistently show early sensory processing deficits in the visual system. Importantly, comparable sensory deficits have also been established in healthy first-degree biological relatives of patients with schizophrenia and in first-episode drug-naive patients. The clear implication is that these measures are endophenotypic, related to the underlying genetic liability for schizophrenia. However, there is significant overlap between patient response distributions and those of healthy individuals without affected first-degree relatives. Here we sought to develop more sensitive measures of sensory dysfunction in this population, with an eye to establishing endophenotypic markers with better predictive capabilities. We used a sensory adaptation paradigm in which electrophysiological responses to basic visual and somatosensory stimuli presented at different rates (ranging from 250 to 2550 ms interstimulus intervals, in blocked presentations) were compared. Our main hypothesis was that adaptation would be substantially diminished in schizophrenia, and that this would be especially prevalent in the visual system. High-density event-related potential recordings showed amplitude reductions in sensory adaptation in patients with schizophrenia (N=15 Experiment 1, N=12 Experiment 2) compared with age-matched healthy controls (N=15 Experiment 1, N=12 Experiment 2), and this was seen for both sensory modalities. At the individual participant level, reduced adaptation was more robust for visual compared with somatosensory stimulation. These results point to significant impairments in short-term sensory plasticity across sensory modalities in schizophrenia. These simple-to-execute measures may prove valuable as candidate endophenotypes and will bear follow-up in future work.
“Atypical visual and somatosensory adaptation in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders” by G N Andrade, J S Butler, G A Peters, S Molholm and J J Foxe in Translational Psychiatry. Published online May 10 2016 doi:10.1038/tp.2016.63
An interesting study. I know that when my wife was alive and we went for an afternoon nap she would get off quickly but it would be a struggle for me to get off because of noises which were hard to block/filter out. The only time I could be sure of getting to sleep in the day was if I was feeling physically ill.
Since being on regular medication(albeit sometimes a bit late) with the depot I now find I can get off for a nap, or sometimes naps, during the day without much trouble.
One of the worst experiences of auditory stimuli was going to a restaurant with my family for my 54th birthday. It was crowded and it was hard to filter out the loud babble to concentrate on what was being said at my table. It was quite overwhelming.
I also hate restaurants!
I’ve been going to a lot of martial arts fights and the noise level is horrendous. I go to cheer on my gym, though, so I just suffer through it. The screaming and shouting, the foot stomping, the sounds of kicks and punches landing, the blaring walk-out music, the howling of little kids and the racket of the fans getting drunk and stumbling around during the fights is overwhelming.
I think I am getting more adjusted to sitting in the middle of large crowds, but I still think of attending a fight as a torturous concert hall playing carmina burana at full blast while strobe lights flash…and the beer smell…and the fear of serious injuries occurring before my very eyes…ugh. too much sensory input, but I’ve been going once a month and it’s getting easier.
The thing I really can’t control is that I apparently get this really dazed expression on my face throughout the whole ordeal. I didn’t realize this until my teammate laughed and casually mentioned he could tell I “got high” while he was backstage waiting for his fight.
The truth was, my eyes were glassy and dazed from overstimulation, lol. Medicinal cannabis is apparently also good for camouflaging signs of severe mental illness…(i joke).
yes this is also something with a separate diagnosis. I was diagnosed several years ago with it Auditory Processing Disorder. There is a good video on youtube somewhere showing what it is.
I was diagnosed by an audiologist when I went for hearing test.
I notice you did not disclose your qualifications within the body of your comment. Please forgive my impudence, but simply quoting someones work as a reference, does not validate your support for the “Neurophysiological investigations” you describe. But I thank you for your writing that was very informative. Can you add to this, by indicating what sonography apparatus has been used to underpin your assetions?
It’s the study I linked five years ago that did the research…not my own research. If you have an issue with the methodology, contact the authors in the abstract I linked.