” The classification of hallucinations examined by the neuroscientists is called presence hallucinations, for which people report an unnoticeable presence next to them, even though no one is there. “We are essentially engineering hallucinations, causing hallucinations and getting a clear, implicit read-out of hallucination susceptibility at an offered time.” The platform supplies a nearly automatic way of determining if somebody is prone to hallucinations, in contrast to existing approaches that range from merely asking somebody if they experience hallucinations, to questionnaires or other methods that include subjective analysis by medical specialists.Monitor hallucinations at homeFor the research study, the researchers also developed a simplified variation of the numerosity experiment, which can be done in the laboratory however also online, unobtrusively, from the convenience of ones own home and without requiring extra training of medical staff.
” The classification of hallucinations examined by the neuroscientists is called presence hallucinations, for which individuals report an undetectable presence next to them, even though no one is there. “We are essentially engineering hallucinations, causing hallucinations and getting a clear, implicit read-out of hallucination vulnerability at a given time.” The platform supplies an almost automatic way of figuring out if someone is vulnerable to hallucinations, in contrast to present methods that vary from just asking someone if they experience hallucinations, to questionnaires or other methods that involve subjective analysis by medical specialists.Monitor hallucinations at homeFor the study, the researchers also developed a streamlined version of the numerosity experiment, which can be done in the laboratory but also online, unobtrusively, from the comfort of ones own home and without needing additional training of medical staff.” We have strategies for determining if a patient with Parkinsons illness experiences presence hallucinations or not, which implies that in the future we ought to be able to identify and keep track of those who are more susceptible to cognitive decline for early treatment,” states Fosco Bernasconi, co-author of the study.From body ownership to technodelicsAlmost a decade back, EPFL researchers designed a robotic task to do something completely various than to assess vulnerability to hallucinations, a tip of the serendipity of science. The scientists understood at this point that they had a subjective way to cause presence hallucinations, thanks to the robotic job that muddles up the users senses.Reference: “Numerosity estimation of virtual humans as a digital-robotic marker for hallucinations in Parkinsons illness” by Louis Albert, Jevita Potheegadoo, Bruno Herbelin, Fosco Bernasconi and Olaf Blanke, 12 March 2024, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/ s41467-024-45912-w.