England University Develops Video Game That Helps Treat Schizophrenia
A recent study has shown that a specifically designed video game could help patients with schizophrenia control the parts of their brain responsible for verbal hallucinations.
In England, a research team from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King's College London and the University of Roehampton monitored the brain activity of their participants through a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner as the participants controlled a rocket in a video game.
The video game required the participants to develop mental strategies to move and land the digital rocket correctly. This reportedly targeted the area of the brain that was sensitive to speech and human voices. Most people who suffer from schizophrenia hear voices, which often lead to a distraction in their reality.
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"The patients know when the voices are about to start - they can feel it, so we want them to immediately put this aid into effect to lessen them, or stop the voices completely," Natasza Orlov, a postdoctoral researcher from the King's College London, told BBC.
The twelve patients, who each had four turns under the MRI scanner, reportedly felt that as they played the game, the voices were internal rather than external, said Orlov.
This meant that as the patients developed a concentration technique to move the rocket, they also achieved a coping mechanism that tuned down the voices that were giving them stress.
"While this is preliminary data, it's particularly promising that patients were able to control their brain activity even without the MRI scanning - suggesting that this may be a strategy that people, who have followed the MRI neuro-feedback training protocol, can benefit from at home," said consultant psychiatrist Sukhi Shergill on the King's College London website.
Although this study is still in its initial stage and has only been tried on a small sample size, researchers are anticipating positive results with the game. With the success of this study, patients with schizophrenia may use the same mental strategies they learned in the game at home.
