Não me posso queixar, além de passear tenho dado largas à minha actividade de vegetar frente ao televisor ou frente ao computador. Foi durante uma destas incursões pela Internet que encontrei um excerto de um artigo da Nature no qual um grupo de cientistas, acidentalmente, encontra uma possível explicação para aquela sensação que todos temos de vez em quando de que estamos a ser perseguidos por alguém ou de que está alguém mesmo atrás de nós. Esta descoberta pode ser importante para explicar alguns sintomas psicóticos como os delírios de perseguição na Esquizofrenia.
Ever feel as though you're being followed? As if someone is behind you, shadowing your every move? It might be your ‘shadow person', created by unusual activity in a specific brain region, a new study shows.
The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a ‘shadow person' who mimicked her bodily movements.
"Electrical stimulation repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in her extra-personal space," said Olaf Blanke, co-author of the study conducted by a team of researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland.
When the patient was lying down, stimulation of this brain region caused her to feel that someone was behind her. She described the person as young, of indeterminate sex, "a shadow who did not speak or move, and whose position beneath her back was identical to her own", according to the researchers.
The temporoparietal junction is known to be involved in creating the concept of ‘self', and the distinction between ‘self' and ‘other'. According to the researchers, stimulation of this region interfered with the patient's ability to integrate information about her own body, leading to her experience of a ‘shadow person'.
Similar shadowy encounters have been described by people with schizophrenia, as well as by healthy subjects, leading the researchers to believe that: "Our findings may be a step towards understanding the mechanisms behind psychiatric manifestations such as paranoia, persecution and alien control."
2 comentários:
psiquiatria nas férias!?
ja vi k a nota foi merecida ;)
Ora ai está uma curiosidade interessante! Na verdade nunca fui muito dado a esse sentimento de ser seguido. Mas se alguma vez encontrares informações valisosas sobre 'déjà vu's, gostava muito de as ler =)
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