A researcher from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has shown that the structure of the brains of schizophrenic people differs from those of non-schizophrenics. Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reports that this leads to sufferers making far fewer connections between the various memories associated with an event.

Neurobiologist Lucia Talamini is to publish her findings in the scientific journal PloS One. From studying the brains of deceased schizophrenic patients, she has already shown that there are fewer connections between the cells in the hippocampus (which plays an important role in recording memories).

To find out how this difference affects the way schizophrenic people think, Dr Talamini and her UvA colleagues worked with computer models of the regions of the brain affected:

"We observed that the reduced connections led to the fragmented storage of memories, with few links being made between objects, people and locations. Afterwards, we experimented with patients to test whether there really was such a problem in the processing of remembered events."

Young schizophrenic patients and healthy volunteers were shown photos of landscapes featuring an object which they were told to remember. Afterwards, they were given the first two letters of the object (for example, 'la' for 'lantern') and asked to recall it. They were also given a background, either that shown in the original photo or a different one.

Dr Talamini: "There was no difference to be seen between the two groups when they had to recall the object with the wrong background but, with the right background, the healthy people did far better. Schizophrenic patients gained little from this contextual information, scoring roughly the same in both types of experiment. This shows they have a problem when it comes to processing contextual information and that individual things or people dominate their thinking.”

It is not yet known if medicines or therapy could treat these problems in schizophrenic people.

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