The subcortical confinement hypothesis: A neurological model for schizotypal hallucinations

Introduction Different types of hallucinations are symptomatic of different conditions. Schizotypal hallucinations are unique in that they follow existing delusional narrative patterns: they are often bizarre, they are generally multimodal, and they are particularly vivid (the experience of a newsreader abusing you personally over the TV is both visual and aural. Patients who feel and hear silicone chips under their skin suffer from haptic hallucinations as well as aural ones, etc.) Although there are a number of hypotheses for hallucinations, few cogently grapple the sheer bizarreness of the ones experienced in schizotypal psychosis. Methods A review-based hypothesis, traversing theory from the molecular level to phenomenological expression as a distinct and recognizable symptomatology. Conclusion Hallucinations appear to be caused by a two-fold dysfunction in the mesofrontal dopamine pathway, which is considered here to mediate attention of different types: in the anterior medial frontal lobe, the receptors (largely D1 type) mediate declarative awareness, whereas the receptors in the striatum (largely D2 type) mediate latent awareness of known schemata. In healthy perception, most of the perceptual load is performed by the latter: by the top-down predictive and mimetic engine, with the bottom-up mechanism being used as a secondary tool to bring conscious deliberation to stimuli that fails to match up against expectations. In schizophrenia, the predictive mode is over-stimulated, while the bottom-up feedback mechanism atrophies. The dysfunctional distribution pattern effectively confines dopamine activity to the striatum, thereby stimulating the structural components of thought and behaviour: well-learned routines, narrative structures, lexica, grammar, schemata, archetypes, and other procedural resources. Meanwhile, the loss of activity in the frontal complex reduces the capacity for declarative awareness and for processing anything that fails to meet expectations.

Fictionalising oral history : narrative analysis, voice and identity

Details of a project which fictionalises the oral history of the life of the author's polio-afflicted grandmother Beth Bevan and her experiences at a home for children with disabilities are presented. The speech and language patterns recognised in the first person narration are described, as also the sense of voice and identity communicated through the oral history.

A thermometer for interdependence: Exploring patterns of interdependence using networks of affordances

Interdependence is a central concept in systems and organizations, yet our methods for measuring it are not well developed. Here, we report on a novel method for transforming digital trace data into networks of events that can be used to visualize and measure interdependence. The edges in the network represent sequential flow and the vertices represent actors, actions and artifacts. We refer to this representation as an affordance network. As with conventional approaches such as process mining, our method uses input from a stream of time-stamped occurrences, but the representation is simpler and more appropriate for exploration and theory building. As digital trace data becomes more widely available, this method may become more useful in information systems research and practice. Like a thermometer, it helps us measure a basic property of a system that would otherwise be difficult to see.

Quantitative electroencephalographic comodulation : an investigation of patterns in chronic fatigue syndrome

Introduction. This is a pilot study of quantitative electro-encephalographic (QEEG) comodulation analysis, which is used to assist in identifying regional brain differences in those people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) compared to a normative database. The QEEG comodulation analysis examines spatial-temporal cross-correlation of spectral estimates in the resting dominant frequency band. A pattern shown by Sterman and Kaiser (2001) and referred to as the anterior posterior dissociation (APD) discloses a significant reduction in shared functional modulation between frontal and centro-parietal areas of the cortex. This research attempts to examine whether this pattern is evident in CFS. Method. Eleven adult participants, diagnosed by a physician as having CFS, were involved in QEEG data collection. Nineteen-channel cap recordings were made in five conditions: eyes-closed baseline, eyes-open, reading task one, math computations task two, and a second eyes-closed baseline. Results. Four of the 11 participants showed an anterior posterior dissociation pattern for the eyes-closed resting dominant frequency. However, seven of the 11 participants did not show this pattern. Examination of the mean 8-12 Hz amplitudes across three cortical regions (frontal, central and parietal) indicated a trend of higher overall alpha levels in the parietal region in CFS patients who showed the APD pattern compared to those who did not have this pattern. All patients showing the pattern were free of medication, while 71% of those absent of the pattern were using antidepressant medications. Conclusions. Although the sample is small, it is suggested that this method of evaluating the disorder holds promise. The fact that this pattern was not consistently represented in the CFS sample could be explained by the possibility of subtypes of CFS, or perhaps co-morbid conditions. Further, the use of antidepressant medications may mask the pattern by altering the temporal characteristics of the EEG. The results of this pilot study indicate that further research is warranted to verify that the pattern holds across the wider population of CFS sufferers.