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One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is having sensory illusions such as hallucinations or hearing voices. Now clues about the role that one area of the brain may play in generating such powerful illusions come from a study by Olaf Blanke of the Brain Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues.
Blanke's team has described a 22-year-old woman with a normal psychiatric history who reported a “shadow man” right behind her when doctors stimulated a certain area of her brain, the left temporoparietal junction, in preparation for neurosurgery. When she sat up from a prone position, so did her phantom man, which convinced Blanke that what she was really experiencing was a distorted sense of her own body.
The patient felt the man was intent on grabbing her and interfering with her actions. “The shadow had bad intentions,” Blanke says, describing how the patient felt. He points out that this compelling sense of an imagined entity bent on causing harm could also underlie conditions such as paranoia, persecution, and the feeling that someone else is in control of your body, a disorder known as alien control.