Eine aktuelle Studie legt nahe, dass Menschen mit psychotischen Störungen die von ihnen erzeugten Empfindungen, wie etwa ihre eigene Berührung oder ihren Herzschlag, anders verarbeiten als Menschen ohne diese Erkrankungen. Diese veränderte Verarbeitung tritt nicht nur im Gehirn auf, sondern auch auf der Ebene des Rückenmarks

A recent study suggests that individuals with psychotic disorders process sensations they produce themselves, such as their own touch or heartbeat, differently from people without these conditions. This altered processing appears not only in the brain but also at the level of the spinal cord, potentially affecting the fundamental sense of self. The findings, published in the Molecular Psychiatry, provide a deeper look into the biological underpinnings of self-disturbance in psychosis.

Psychotic disorders like schizophrenia are often characterized by a disrupted sense of self. This can manifest in symptoms like hallucinations or delusions, where individuals might misattribute their own inner thoughts or actions to an outside source. Researchers have long theorized that these complex symptoms may originate from more fundamental difficulties in processing basic bodily signals.

A team of scientists, primarily from Linköping University in Sweden, sought to investigate this idea by examining how the nervous system handles sensations that are self-generated compared to those that come from the external world. Their goal was to use a variety of methods to get a comprehensive picture of self-related processing across different sensory systems.

“Schizophrenia is a complex disorder, and its underlying neurobiological mechanisms are still not understood. Especially, how hallucinations and delusions develop and are maintained remains unclear,” said study author Rebecca Böhme, an associate professor at the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience at Linköping University.

“We hypothesized that a disturbance in the ability of identify self-produced sensations can underlie these symptoms, for example when the own thoughts are not identified as ‘self-produced,’ then they might cause the experience of voices in the head or being controlled from outside forces. Similar for touch: not identifying self-evoked tactile sensations can cause the feeling of ‘something else’ touching you, which the brain then will try to explain – potentially with a quite irrational story, because the brain always looks for causes to its experiences. It might for example come up with the idea, that an invisible demon is following and controlling you through touch

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03130-w

a failure to filter your own internal sensations would likely contribute to a failure in general sensory gating. If your brain can’t even ignore its own noise, it’s going to have a hard time filtering external noise, too. I think, we knew it for some time, here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_gating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_gating)