New Research Using EEG to Analyze Brain Function in Psychiatric Conditions

Matt Kuntz
4 min readAug 6, 2021

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EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline

Shor O, Glik A, Yaniv-Rosenfeld A, Valevski A, Weizman A, Khrennikov A, Benninger F. EEG p-adic quantum potential accurately identifies depression, schizophrenia and cognitive decline. PLoS One. 2021 Aug 5;16(8):e0255529. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255529. PMID: 34351992.

  • “No diagnostic or predictive instruments to help with early diagnosis and timely therapeutic intervention are available as yet for most neuro-psychiatric disorders.”
  • “A quantum potential mean and variability score (qpmvs), to identify neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive disorders with high accuracy, based on routine EEG recordings, was developed.”
  • “Participants consisted of 230 participants including 28 with major depression, 42 with schizophrenia, 65 with cognitive impairment, and 95 controls. Routine EEG recordings were used for the calculation of qpmvs based on ultrametric analyses, closely coupled with p-adic numbers and quantum theory.”
  • “Based on area under the curve, high accuracy was obtained in separating healthy controls from those diagnosed with schizophrenia (p<0.0001), depression (p<0.0001), Alzheimer’s disease (AD; p<0.0001), and mild cognitive impairment (MCI; p<0.0001) as well as in differentiating participants with schizophrenia from those with depression (p<0.0001), AD (p<0.0001) or MCI (p<0.0001) and in differentiating people with depression from those with AD (p<0.0001) or MCI (p<0.0001).”
  • “The novel EEG analytic algorithm (qpmvs) seems to be a useful and sufficiently accurate tool for diagnosis of neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive diseases and may be able to predict disease course and response to treatment.”

Predicting subclinical psychotic-like experiences on a continuum using machine learning

Taylor JA, Larsen KM, Dzafic I, Garrido MI. Predicting subclinical psychotic-like experiences on a continuum using machine learning. Neuroimage. 2021 Jul 22;241:118329. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118329. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34302968.

  • “Previous studies applying machine learning methods to psychosis have primarily been concerned with the binary classification of chronic schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.”
  • “The aim of this study was to use electroencephalographic (EEG) data and pattern recognition to predict subclinical psychotic-like experiences on a continuum between these two extremes in otherwise healthy people.”
  • “Features within the P50 and P200 time windows had the greatest contribution toward lower Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ) scores and the N100 time window contributed most to higher PQ scores. As a proof-of-concept, these findings demonstrate that EEG data alone are predictive of individual psychotic-like experiences in healthy people.”
  • “Our findings are in keeping with the mounting evidence for altered sensory responses in schizophrenia, as well as the notion that psychosis may exist on a continuum expanding into the non-clinical population.”

Reduced readiness potential and post-movement beta synchronization reflect self-disorders in early course schizophrenia

Donati FL, Fecchio M, Maestri D, Cornali M, Derchi CC, Casetta C, Zalaffi M, Sinigaglia C, Sarasso S, D’Agostino A. Reduced readiness potential and post-movement beta synchronization reflect self-disorders in early course schizophrenia. Sci Rep. 2021 Jul 22;11(1):15044. doi: 10.1038/s41598–021–94356–5. PMID: 34294767; PMCID: PMC8298598.

  • “Disturbances of conscious awareness, or self-disorders, are a defining feature of schizophrenia. These include symptoms such as delusions of control, i.e. the belief that one’s actions are controlled by an external agent.”
  • “Models of self-disorders point at altered neural mechanisms of source monitoring, i.e. the ability of the brain to discriminate self-generated stimuli from those driven by the environment. However, evidence supporting this putative relationship is currently lacking.”
  • “We performed electroencephalography (EEG) during self-paced, brisk right fist closures in ten (M = 9; F = 1) patients with Early-Course Schizophrenia (ECSCZ) and age and gender-matched healthy volunteers.”
  • “Our data suggest that disturbances of neural correlates preceding and following self-initiated movements may reflect the severity of self-disorders in patients suffering from ECSCZ. These findings point towards deficits in basic mechanisms of sensorimotor integration as a substrate for self-disorders.”

Multiscale criticality measures as general-purpose gauges of proper brain function

Fekete T, Hinrichs H, Sitt JD, Heinze HJ, Shriki O. Multiscale criticality measures as general-purpose gauges of proper brain function. Sci Rep. 2021 Jul 14;11(1):14441. doi: 10.1038/s41598–021–93880–8. PMID: 34262121; PMCID: PMC8280148.

  • “The brain is universally regarded as a system for processing information. If so, any behavioral or cognitive dysfunction should lend itself to depiction in terms of information processing deficiencies.”
  • “Information is characterized by recursive, hierarchical complexity. The brain accommodates this complexity by a hierarchy of large/slow and small/fast spatiotemporal loops of activity. Thus, successful information processing hinges upon tightly regulating the spatiotemporal makeup of activity, to optimally match the underlying multiscale delay structure of such hierarchical networks. Reduced capacity for information processing will then be expressed as deviance from this requisite multiscale character of spatiotemporal activity. This deviance is captured by a general family of multiscale criticality measures (MsCr).”
  • “MsCr measures reflect the behavior of conventional criticality measures (such as the branching parameter) across temporal scale. We applied MsCr to MEG and EEG data in several telling degraded information processing scenarios. Consistently with our previous modeling work, MsCr measures systematically varied with information processing capacity: MsCr fingerprints showed deviance in the four states of compromised information processing examined in this study, disorders of consciousness, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia and even during pre-ictal activity.”
  • “MsCr measures might thus be able to serve as general gauges of information processing capacity and, therefore, as normative measures of brain health.”

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Matt Kuntz
Matt Kuntz

Written by Matt Kuntz

A weird mix of mental health, policy, tech, writing, and Montana. Views are my own, not of any organization I’m involved with.

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