I had to include this creepy picture from the article. It's kind of horror movie / David Lynch.
Scientist have discovered a way to test for schizophrenia by simply observing the eyes of patients as they perform three simple functions:
1. Smooth pursuit: Everyone knows that your eyes need to be focused on something in order to move across the plane of vision smoothly. If you didn't know that, try it: try to move your eyes across the horizon smoothly without jumping from one object to another. It's impossible. With this test, researchers had subjects watch an object moving smoothly across their field of vision. Those with schizophrenia were unable to watch the object moving without jerking their vision forward rapidly.
2. Free-viewing: When we look at something -- a picture, a video, a person, etc -- our eyes take in lots of information. Usually, the eyes follow a specific pattern of movements depending on what we're looking at. They jump from one point to another, internalizing as much detail as possible. The eyes of people with schizophrenia, however, do not follow the normal patterns that have been observed in healthy patients.
3. Gaze Fixation Tasks: As anyone who has worked in retail, or in a cubicle, can tell you, staring at one point -- the fuzzy cubicle wall, for instance -- can be pretty easy. Not so with schizophrenia patients.
By studying the differences in the results of these tests between healthy patients and those with schizophrenia, scientists are confident that they can determine the likelihood of schizophrenia in a person with up to 98% accuracy.
I tried to perform those tests on myself. I'm pretty sure I don't have schizophrenia, but the voice in my head says I might be biased.
-JJ
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