Scientists are pulling back the curtain on a mysterious phenomenon - how hallucinations are produced in the brain.
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00:00A new study focused on mice has found a key neural circuit that may be responsible for
00:08psychotic disorders.
00:11Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory developed a new model of testing after showing
00:16mice are just as susceptible to psychosis as humans are.
00:20Test subjects, humans and mice alike, reported how confidently they heard a sound played
00:26which was obscured with background noise.
00:29Mice were trained to indicate whether they'd heard a sound, demonstrating their confidence
00:34by how long they waited for a reward.
00:36The researchers found that similar to humans, mice were more likely to falsely report sounds
00:42when sounds played more frequently and when a hallucinogen, ketamine, was administered.
00:48By monitoring the rodents' brains, the researchers found elevated dopamine levels preceding hallucinations.
00:55According to senior author Adam Kepiks, a neural circuit in the brain balances prior
01:01beliefs and the higher the baseline level of dopamine, the more people rely on prior
01:06beliefs.
01:07We think that hallucinations occur when this neural circuit gets unbalanced and antipsychotics
01:13rebalance it, he told Washington University's The Source.
01:18While dopamine is known to play a role in psychosis, how the chemical rewires brain
01:23circuitry to produce hallucinations remains a mystery.
01:27The new model could allow researchers to probe deeper and identify new treatments for psychotic
01:33disorders.
01:34Right now, we're failing people with serious psychiatric conditions because we don't really
01:39understand the neurobiology of the disease, Kepiks explained.
01:43We're not going to make progress in treating psychiatric illnesses until we have a good
01:48way to model them in animals.