Neural synchrony indexes disordered perception and cognition in schizophrenia.

By K. Spencer, P. Nestor, R. Perlmutter, M. Niznikiewicz, Meredith C Klump, Melissa Frumin, Martha Elizabeth Shenton, Robert W. McCarley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004

599 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current views of schizophrenia suggest that it results from abnormalities in neural circuitry, but empirical evidence in the millisecond range of neural activity has been difficult to obtain. In pursuit of relevant evidence, we previously demonstrated that schizophrenia is associated with abnormal patterns of stimulus-evoked phaselocking of the electroencephalogram in the gamma band (30-100 Hz). These patterns may reflect impairments in neural assemblies, which have been proposed to use gamma-band oscillations as a mechanism for synchronization. Here, we report the unique finding that, in both healthy controls and schizophrenia patients, visual Gestalt stimuli elicit a gamma-band oscillation that is phase-locked to reaction time and hence may reflect processes leading to conscious perception of the stimuli. However, the frequency of this oscillation is lower in schizophrenics than in healthy individuals. This finding suggests that, although synchronization must occur for perception of the Gestalt, it occurs at a lower frequency because of a reduced capability of neural networks to support high-frequency synchronization in the brain of schizophrenics. Furthermore, the degree of phase locking of this oscillation is correlated with visual hallucinations, thought disorder, and disorganization in the schizophrenia patients. These data provide support for linking dysfunctional neural circuitry and the core symptoms of schizophrenia.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51f29c88172ba3a318a25d06460024adc9f11cc2

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Transcranial alternating current stimulation entrains single-neuron activity in the primate brain (2019, background): “Changes in synchronous activity appear to underlie momentary lapses in performance (4) and serious pathological conditions (5), so even small changes in spike timing, when distributed across a network of neurons, may exert a powerful influence on behavior.”
Human EEG gamma oscillations in neuropsychiatric disorders. (2005, methodology): “In line with that result, Spencer et al. (2004) revealed that schizophrenic patients with hallucinations showed increased high-frequency oscillations.”
Normal and pathological oscillatory communication in the brain (2005, background): “Abnormalities in neural synchronization have also been reported in schizophrenia, in which a failure of stimulus-locked and a reduced frequency of response-locked gamma-band oscillations have been observe”
Cortical inhibitory neurons and schizophrenia (2005, background): “The abnormalities in GABA neurons that contribute to the working memory disturbances and the resulting clinical features of schizophrenia might also have a role in the dysfunction of other cortical regions that have been associated with reduced gamma band synchron”
Neurophysiological and Computational Principles of Cortical Rhythms in Cognition (2010, background): “Spencer and collaborators (895) found that in response to a Gestalt stimulus, there was a brief ( 100 ms) burst of gamma-band EEG power phase-locked to the reaction time in the occipital cortex of healthy subjects, but the peaked power was weaker and at lower frequencies in schizophrenic patients.”
Synaptic plasticity and dysconnection in schizophrenia. (2006, methodology): “…Meyer-Lindenberg et al 2005 Replicated finding Abnormal Gamma Synchrony During Sensory Processing (as measured by MEG/EEG) Lee et al 2003 (review) Spencer et al 2004 Symond et al 2005 Replicated finding Abnormal Patterns of Functional Interactions as Measured by EEG Breakspear et al 2003 Koukkou…”