This is sad and spooky: When a young person at risk of developing psychotic disease performs a task that pits his hands against each other, his brain doesn’t treat both hands as his own.
Schizophrenia, the most common psychosis, sometimes looks like a failure of the brain to pin down a “self.” In a normal head, a clear, reliable identity takes shape. This allows a human to take an orderly approach to all the stuff in the world that is not “self.”
But if your sense of self is unstable, you’ll have a hard time interacting with people, places, and things.
The researchers here used a physical test of “self awareness,” hoping for a simpler diagnostic test than a big, fat questionnaire. And it looks as though they found one.
The set up: You, the subject, hold in your right hand an electronic device that looks like a metal bathtub stopper. I, the experimenter, will release a second such device that’s hanging on a string. It’s going to swing like a pendulum toward your stopper, and I want you to hold your stopper steady when the two collide.
The measurement: How tightly you grip that stopper will reveal how you prepare to stop the pendulum. You grip it hard, because you don’t know when I’m going to release my stopper.
…BONK!
Good job. Now for round two:
This time, use your own left hand to release the pendulum, and stop it as before with your right hand.
Does your brain relax a bit, since you know when the stopper is coming? Does your grip loosen because your hands are coordinating through your brain?
In normal adolescents, it does. The boo-hoo is that in kids at high risk for developing psychosis, the brain does not relax. The right hand is just as uncertain of when that pendulum is coming as it was when the experimenter was the one releasing it. The left hand is a stranger.
This test proved more accurate (and a lot quicker) than the standard questionnaire.
There’s something poignant about it, though — that simple illustration of one’s alienation from one’s own self. Our hands are supposed to be our ambassadors to the world, not unpredictable strangers. Makes me quite sad for the psychotics.
