My Perspective

My latest paper in the Neuroimage: clinical journal assessed the impairments in neural entrainment to speech envelope in early stage psychosis. Impairments in language processing in Schizophrenia are a central aspect of the disorder but the underlying pathophysiology mechanisms are unclear. We tested the hypothesis that neural oscillations are impaired during speech tracking in early-stage Schizophrenia and in participants at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used in combination with source reconstructed time-series to examine delta and theta-band entrainment during continuous speech. Participants were presented with a 5-minute audio recording during which they either attended to the story or word level. Theta-band entrainment in left Heschl’s gyrus, averaged across groups, was significantly lower in the STORY compared to WORD condition, and averaged over conditions, significantly lower in CHR-Ps, but intact in early schizophrenia patients, comp...

I won a prize for my photo submission entitled "Hollow Mask Illusion" under "the 'why' of shapes" category (adult level) in the "Maths Inside 2023" photo competition that aims to popularize scientific thinking in the general public. My submission discusses why people do not perceive the obverse side of a mask as a concave face but as a regular face instead. This illusion is robust in general and everyone can be surprised at this trick on the brain unless they suffer from Schizophrenia. Here is my winning photo and the caption. This image shows the obverse side of a mask that has been painted to showcase a face. When people see the reverse side of a mask, they are usually unable to perceive it as concave or a hollow face, but instead see a convex regular face as seen in this image. This illusion is a classic example of how brain uses its top-down expectations to shape visual perception. The "Predictive coding account of perceptual inference...

My latest paper published in Biological Psychiatry: CNNi journal aimed to assess whether Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is reduced in early stage psychosis. MMN is an event-related potential that occurs when repetitive sounds are interrupted by an occasional sound that differs in frequency or duration. Many studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in this process. Moreover, there is evidence that MMN-deficits may be present in early-stage psychosis.  To investigate this possibility, we employed Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to establish whether MMN-responses are impaired in participants at 116 Clinical High Risk for psychosis and 33 First Episode Psychosis Patients compared with 38 psychiatric controls and 49 healthy controls. Contrary to our hypothesis, MMN-responses were intact, suggesting that MMN may not constitute a biomarker for early detection and diagnosis of psychosis. Reference : [1] Pradeep D, et. al., "Intact Mismatch Negativity Responses in Clinical ...