A study using a procedure called the rubber hand illusion has found striking new evidence that people experiencing schizophrenia have a weakened sense of body ownership and has produced the first case of a spontaneous, out-of-body experience in the laboratory.
These findings suggest that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies, including some forms of yoga and dance, could be helpful for many of the2.2 million people in the United States who suffer from this mental disorder.
The study, which appears in the Oct. 31 issue of the scientific journalPublic Library of Science One, measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia patients and 21 matched control subjects by testing their susceptibility to the "rubber hand illusion" or RHI. This tactile illusion, which was discovered in 1998, is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the subject's hidden hand.
"After a while, patients with schizophrenia begin to 'feel' the rubber hand and disown their own hand. They also experience their real hand as closer to the rubber hand." said Sohee Park, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Psychology and Psychiatry, who conducted the study with doctoral candidate Katharine Thakkar and research analysts Heathman Nichols and Lindsey McIntosh.
"Healthy people get this illusion too, but weakly," Park said. "Some don't get it at all, and there is a wide range of individual differences in how people experience this illusion that is related to a personality trait called schizotypy, associated with psychosis-proneness."
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111031220259
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