Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Schizophrenia syncs fast

Psychcentral reports that a flaw in how the brain synchronizes information may lie at heart of schizophrenia.

The story reports that "Interconnected brain areas that use split-second timing to interpret new information suffer a communication breakdown in people with schizophrenia, a new study suggests.

The finding hinges on measurements of some brain waves that arise from synchronized activity in large clusters of neurons.

... people diagnosed with their first bout of schizophrenia display a decline in neural synchrony, especially in the frontal brain, in the fraction of a second after discerning a particular tone, Williams’ team reports in the March American Journal of Psychiatry. Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit unusually low levels of synchronized neural firing to begin with, the researchers note.

If confirmed in further work, these findings raise the likelihood that “a breakdown in the synchrony of distributed neural networks is a marker for the onset of schizophrenia,” the researchers conclude.

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