Schizophrenia treatment could get a boost from new research findings suggesting that some people may have a better memory of reality than others.
A new study from Cambridge University analyzed data from 53 people and found a direct relationship between a person’s ability to distinguish between real or imagined memories and the size of their paracingulate sulcus (PCS), an area of the brain that is one of the last to develop before birth.
Specifically, the study found that participants with a larger PCS were better at distinguishing real memories from imagined ones.
According to Jon Simons, lead author of the study, this could lead scientists to better understand more about schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder affecting around 24 million people.
"The memory differences we observed were quite striking. It is exciting to think that these individual differences in ability might have a basis in a simple brain folding variation," said Simons, as quoted by Reuters. "Hallucinations are often reported whereby, for example, someone hears a voice when nobody's there. Difficulty distinguishing real from imagined information might be an explanation for such hallucinations. The person might imagine the voice but misattribute it as coming from the outside world.
“We've found evidence that suggests this particular (brain) region might be reduced in people with schizophrenia, and that this could be the beginning of an explanation for why these people experience hallucinations.”
The research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
