Jo Kavaliauskas once saw human bodies hanging from a meat hook, an image so real they could escape it only by shutting their eyes and going to sleep on the couch. Aliens and demons sometimes appear through the windows, leaving Kavaliauskas terrified to go outside. At 34, they endure the daily hallucinations caused by schizoaffective disorder but dream of a life without them, how it would feel to thrive in a career and make friends with ease.
Now, science appears to be a step closer to understanding how the brain generates hallucinations like Kavaliauskas’s, raising hopes that someday they might be preventable, according to the authors of a study published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Allen Institute in Seattle used lasers to record and stimulate the activity of neurons in mice in order to learn how the brain processes and interprets optical illusions. Their study may also have applications to artificial intelligence, helping researchers to examine whether machine vision systems can perceive illusions in the same way that humans do, said Hyeyoung Shin, the paper’s lead author.
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