Korean researchers achieve breakthrough in hallucination treatment

[Courtesy of The Korea Institute of Science and Technology]

A team of South Korean researchers has achieved a breakthrough in real-time observation of the brain in a hallucinatory state, raising expectations for a clue to preventing hallucinatory symptoms caused by mental disorders.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced on Sunday that a joint research team led by Moon Hyuk-june, a senior researcher at the KIST Bionics Research Center, and Olaf Blanke, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, successfully induced illusory drifts in self-location toward controlled directions using visuo-tactile bodily stimulation while observing resulting brain changes.

The researchers evaluated the corresponding grid cell-like representation (GCLR) in the entorhinal cortex (EC) through functional MRI analysis.

In the study, the researchers linked the body of participants in the MRI scanner with an avatar placed within a virtual environment through visuo-tactile stimulations and investigated whether experimentally induced spatial dissociations between the perceived location of the self and the physical location of one‘s own body would impact grid-like representation in the human EC.

Their findings reveal that illusory changes in perceived self-location can indeed evoke entorhinal GCLR, correlating in strength with the magnitude of perceived self-location and characterized by similar grid orientation as during conventional virtual navigation in the same virtual room.

According to the findings, multisensory stimulation does not only induce illusory drifts in self-location and the projection of the participant toward the avatar and into the virtual environment but will allow the manipulation of other important multisensory aspects of one’s own body perception and their role in navigation and GCLR.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), in March.