An App for Fighting the Voices in Your Head
Posted by Sam_McDougle on Monday, Feb 06, 2012
Welcome to the age of mobile mind medicine. A research team in Norway, led by Professor Kenneth Hugdahl of the University of Bergen, is in the early stages of developing a mobile app for schizophrenic patients. The app is designed to help schizophrenics train their brain to ignore the ultra-realistic, often unsettling inner voices characteristic of severe cases of the disease.
When schizophrenics hear voices, the experience is often so tangible and real-feeling that it is impossible to ignore. If you were to amplify that annoying voice in your head that tells you to stop drinking, or keep drinking, or shower more, or succeed more, or to do terrible things, by ten thousand and you’ll probably just start to get the idea. Consequently, in the midst of an auditory hallucination, a schizophrenic individual cannot understand the voices of real people in the outside world, or worse, cannot even hear those real voices. Using fMRI imaging techniques, Hugdahl and his team support the idea that the hallucinating schizophrenic brain misfires, effectively shutting out the outer voices:
When neurons become activated by inner voices it inhibits perception of outside speech. The neurons become ‘preoccupied’ and can’t ‘process’ voices from the outside…this may explain why schizophrenic patients close themselves off so completely and lose touch with the outside world when experiencing hallucinations.
The key to dealing with this problem, Hugdahl argues, is to make the brain better at ignoring, to cultivate a sort of reverse follow-your-inner voice policy. Using simple stereo playback programs, the researchers developed a mobile app for their schizophrenic subjects. The app plays different voices in each ear simultaneously, and then asks to the patient to focus on a single voice at a time. The point of this is to put a schizophrenic patient in a scenario where they’re straining to attend to outer voices (via the headphones and the complex task) while hallucinating, thus training the attending neurons to ignore the inner voice in favor of the outer.
The research is ongoing and has only been tested on a few patients, but the preliminary results have been “promising,” according to Hugdahl. Beyond its incredible medical potential, I also see these kind of apps as one of many steps towards a mainstream group of future medical apps. I’m holding out for a team of capable Norwegian neuroscientists to make an app that will train my brain to find comfort in my future life on the Gingrich Moon Base, where I will by the coast of the Sea of Tranquility, softly pinching floating grapes out of the thin moon air as Newt and I nostalgically discuss his monumental three-term presidency. Wait, did I say that?
Image: Warner Brothers
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