It was thought that the 'cradle' of schizophrenia was in the most evolved part of the brain, i.e. the frontal cortex that controls more complex activities such as language and the ability to plan actions, while the motor that triggers hallucinations is found in very different areas and far from this. The result, obtained in Italy, is the first important step to develop a new attack strategy against one of the most mysterious diseases. The discovery, published in the journal Neuroimage: Clinical, is due to the Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems (Cncs) of the Italian Institute of Technology (iit) in Rovereto. "Understanding the brain regions at the origin of schizophrenia is the first step in planning more targeted pharmacological therapies against this disease", observed the coordinator of the research group, Angelo Bifone. The clues that made it possible to identify the areas in which schizophrenia disorders arise came from the comparison of images of brain activity detected with the functional magnetic resonance technique in 94 healthy people and in as many with schizophrenia. The results indicated that areas of the frontal cortex are not altered and that schizophrenia involves alterations in the initial perception of the signal that reverberate on higher cognitive functions, altering them. Thus it emerged that "communication is already impaired at a very low level of signal processing", observed the first author of the research, Ce'cile Bordier. Schizophrenia has so far been known to be associated with a malfunction in communication between different areas of the cerebral cortex, a sort of short circuit called fragmentation of functional connectivity. However, it was not known which areas of the brain were involved and the most accredited hypothesis indicated those of the frontal cortex. This was, until now, the commonly accepted explanation for the origin of symptoms of schizophrenia, such as psychosis, hallucinations, difficulty in recognizing and processing the pitch and intonation of sounds, and aberrations of visual perception, such as those documented in the pictorial representation of a cat by the British artist Luis Wain during the advancement of his illness.
