10/06/2022
In her neuroimaging research, however, it can be trickier to accommodate this nuance. While some types of delusions can feel very different—for example, grandiose and persecutory delusions seem almost antithetical—neuroscience studies often have to elide those differences for practical reasons. Finding differences between the brains of two groups of people is potentially possible in a small study; finding differences among 10 groups is not. “To get enough signal to rise from the noise, you’ve got to assume you can find the same thing in all those people that you’re looking to measure,” Keedy says.
But some scientists are working to incorporate first-person testimony into their research, despite the inherent challenges. Park asks study participants to report a phenomenon called a “felt presence,” the sense that someone is there when they in fact are not, by using software to digitally “paint” a silhouette of a body to show the location of that presence. That way, she can directly compare different people’s experiences. Using this method, Park has found that people with schizophrenia often experience felt presences within, rather than outside of, their bodies. For his part, Corlett hopes to soon integrate first-person accounts into his research using machine learning. Algorithms can churn through pieces of text and transform their themes, emotions, and coherence, among other attributes, into numbers—and unlike the raw narratives, these numbers could be used for further statistical analysis.
