People with schizophrenia see through visual illusions that trick most people
Diagnosing schizophrenia can be difficult as its symptoms often resemble those of other diseases and conditions, including bipolar illness and severe depression or several neurological disorders.
Mental health professionals currently rely on a series of psychological and life-history evaluations as a way to diagnose patients. But a three-dimensional illusion that tricks most people into seeing close objects in the distance and background objects up close may represent a breakthrough in detecting the illness.
This potentially lifesaving use for visual illusions has emerged from collaboration between a Rutgers vision researcher and a UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School clinical psychologist that began almost by chance four years ago.
The so-called reverse perspective illusions that the researchers are testing are not new – they’ve been around for centuries as art and entertainment. In recent years, scientists have used them to pin down how the mind sometimes misinterprets what the eyes see.
But it turns out that people with schizophrenia are not that easily fooled by visual illusions. That’s the key to their potential as a powerful diagnostic tool.
“These Illusions can be viewed as a sort of thermometer to measure the severity of brain processes underlying psychosis,” said Steven Silverstein, professor of psychiatry at the RWJ Medical School and director of schizophrenia research at UMDNJ-University Behavioral HealthCare. Today there is no simple biological marker or lab test for schizophrenia, he notes.
Silverstein and his Rutgers collaborator, Thomas Papathomas, are rigorously testing the effectiveness of illusions as a way to diagnose and measure the level of psychosis in schizophrenia in clinical environments. They are also working to establish their illusions as reliable, inexpensive and easy-to-use tests – something accessible to smaller clinics and not limited to major teaching hospitals.
Papathomas, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the university’s Laboratory for Vision Research, is a renowned vision researcher informally regarded as an accomplished illusionist. He educates students and entertains campus visitors with face masks and cityscapes that appear to rotate to the right when someone turns them to the left, and vice-versa, because of the way our minds process perspective, and in these cases, misperceive it.