CRBS Seminar series : The experience of time in patients with schizophrenia

Abstract:

In the Unit U 1114, we try to understand the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders and to develop innovative treatments. These objectives entail explaining strange symptoms, like the attribution of one’s own actions or thoughts to an alien entity, and understanding how such symptoms relate to neurobiological disorders.
After a short summary of the different ways we address these questions in the laboratory, I will illustrate our approach by showing how we explore the experience of time in patients with schizophrenia. Those patients feel disconnected from the environment and report difficult-to-describe temporal experiences, i.e. fragmented time, which would reflect the temporal fragmentation of their sense of self. Experimentally, the patients show disturbances in the detection of asynchronies and in the temporal ordering of stimuli, consistent with distortions in the temporal structure of consciousness. I will explain why the magnitude of the alterations led us to explore temporal processing at a non-conscious level. I will show the findings, which led us to propose that the strange experiences of patients reveal something even stranger in the normal functioning of the brain, and which now lead to the development of new therapeutics like cerebellum stimulation.