thinking outside the circle

Is this the next big step toward a cure for schizophrenia?

The study participants were asked to look at either of two images containing four 'Pac-man' figures - circles with a quarter missing.

In one image, the four shapes were arranged to optically suggest a square in the centre. The participants were asked to press a button to show if they perceived a square or not.

At the same time, the scientists monitored the participants' brain waves using EEG, which gives a trace of the brain's electrical activity.

Both groups were able to respond to the images within a second, but those with schizophrenia made more errors and took about 200 milliseconds longer to process the image.

When the researchers looked at the brain wave patterns they found the patients with schizophrenia showed no activity in a certain wave band when performing the button-pushing task.

However, the healthy volunteers had visible gamma wave activity, indicating that their brains were processing the visual information to guide their response.

Lead researcher Dr Robert McCarley said: "There was a pretty dramatic difference. The schizophrenics did not show this gamma-band response at all.

"If the most efficient communication between assemblies of neurons is at 40 hertz, and the schizophrenics are using a lower frequency, it's likely they have defective communication between cell assemblies and brain regions."

Add this to the re-working of the epidemiology of mental illness, and we're talking a diagnostic and therapeutic revolution, away from broad-based drugs toward targeted treatments and anti-bacterial warfare.

This isn't just the Decade of the Brain or the Century of the Neuron. We live in the Age of Neuroscience.