A reflection upon methods to explore timing in patients with schizophrenia

Abstract

Phenomenologists have provided a detailed description of the disorders of the subjective experience associated with minimalself disorders in patients with schizophrenia. Those patients report a range of distortions of their conscious experiences, including a sense of inner void, confusion between self and others, and, sometimes, a disruption of the sense of time. These reports have been interpreted as distortion of the first-person perspective and a lack of immersion in the world, associated with a breakdown of the temporal structure of consciousness, and especially a disruption of the sense of time continuity. Further, it has been proposed that these disruptions are based on a difficulty to retain past information and to predict future information, that is, the mechanisms that help to relate events with one another and to reach a sense of time continuity. Experimental psychology results seem to converge to similar conclusions, inasmuch as some results in patients with schizophrenia suggest a deficient ability to predict sequences of events at the millisecond level. Several studies have underlined this convergence. Here we reflect on the limits of both the phenomenological and experimental psychology approaches, and of the convergence of their hypotheses. We think that this reflection is necessary to avoid premature conclusions on the mechanisms underlying the impairments in patients, but also to enrich our understanding of schizophrenia.

Journey through a virtual tunnel: Simulated motion and its effects on the experience of time

“…The estimation of time is a fundamental feature of interpreting 'cause and effect,' meaning that it is imperative to our own feelings of agency (Haggard, 2017), the idea that we as individuals are able to interact with the world and maintain the feeling that it is we who are causing an effect. Both the sense of agency and perceptions of time are present in altered forms in pathological mental conditions, such as depression, autism, and schizophrenia (Allman, 2015;Kühn et al, 2018;Martin et al, 2019). How time passes has been the subject of much research, particularly on how one can modulate the subjective experience.…”

Altered states of consciousness: With special reference to time and the self

“…Patients with schizophrenia and subjects with a high risk of developing schizophrenia endorse more items than controls, and the results validate the scale. In all, this work provides an interesting and easy‐to‐use tool for any research targeting bodily–self and time disorders. The article by Martin, Franck, and Giersch () is insofar an important contribution as the authors conceptually discuss potential links between different levels of timing and time perception deficits with self‐disorders in patients with schizophrenia. The authors highlight potential avenues for these links in understanding this neuropsychiatric disease.…”