Navegando por Autor "Mota, Natália B."

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Graph analysis of dream reports is especially informative about psychosis
(2014-01-15) Mota, Natália B.; Furtado, Raimundo; Maia, Pedro P. C.; Copelli, Mauro; Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
Early psychiatry investigated dreams to understand psychopathologies. Contemporary psychiatry, which neglects dreams, has been criticized for lack of objectivity. In search of quantitative insight into the structure of psychotic speech, we investigated speech graph attributes (SGA) in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type I, and non-psychotic controls as they reported waking and dream contents. Schizophrenic subjects spoke with reduced connectivity, in tight correlation with negative and cognitive symptoms measured by standard psychometric scales. Bipolar and control subjects were undistinguishable by waking reports, but in dream reports bipolar subjects showed significantly less connectivity. Dream-related SGA outperformed psychometric scores or waking-related data for group sorting. Altogether, the results indicate that online and offline processing, the two most fundamental modes of brain operation, produce nearly opposite effects on recollections: While dreaming exposes differences in the mnemonic records across individuals, waking dampens distinctions. The results also demonstrate the feasibility of the differential diagnosis of psychosis based on the analysis of dream graphs, pointing to a fast, low-cost and language-invariant tool for psychiatric diagnosis and the objective search for biomarkers. The Freudian notion that “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” is clinically useful, after all.
Post-class naps boost declarative learning in a naturalistic school setting
(2018-08-21) Cabral, Thiago; Mota, Natália B.; Fraga, Lucia; Copelli, Mauro; McDaniel, Mark A.; Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
Laboratory evidence of a positive effect of sleep on declarative memory consolidation suggests that naps can be used to boost school learning in a scalable, low-cost manner. The few direct investigations of this hypothesis have so far upheld it, but departed from the naturalistic setting by testing non-curricular contents presented by experimenters instead of teachers. Furthermore, nap and non-nap groups were composed of different children. Here we assessed the effect of post-class naps on the retention of Science and History curricular contents presented by the regular class teacher to 24 students from 5th grade. Retention was repeatedly measured 3–4 days after content learning, with weekly group randomization over 6 consecutive weeks. Contents followed by long naps (>30 min), but not short naps (<30 min), were significantly more retained than contents followed by waking (Cohen’s d = 0.7962). The results support the use of post-class morning naps to enhance formal education.
Psychosis and the Control of Lucid Dreaming
(Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 2016) Mota, Natália B.; Resende, Adara; Mota-Rolim, Sérgio A.; Copelli, Mauro; Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
Dreaming and psychosis share important features, such as intrinsic sense perceptions independent of external stimulation, and a general lack of criticism that is associated with reduced frontal cerebral activity. Awareness of dreaming while a dream is happening defines lucid dreaming (LD), a state in which the prefrontal cortex is more active than during regular dreaming. For this reason, LD has been proposed to be potentially therapeutic for psychotic patients. According to this view, psychotic patients would be expected to report LD less frequently, and with lower control ability, than healthy subjects. Furthermore, psychotic patients able to experience LD should present milder psychiatric symptoms, in comparison with psychotic patients unable to experience LD. To test these hypotheses, we investigated LD features (occurrence, control abilities, frequency, and affective valence) and psychiatric symptoms (measure by PANSS, BPRS, and automated speech analysis) in 45 subjects with psychotic symptoms [25 with Schizophrenia (S) and 20 with Bipolar Disorder (B) diagnosis] versus 28 non-psychotic control (C) subjects. Psychotic lucid dreamers reported control of their dreams more frequently (67% of S and 73% of B) than non-psychotic lucid dreamers (only 23% of C; S > C with p = 0.0283, B > C with p = 0.0150). Importantly, there was no clinical advantage for lucid dreamers among psychotic patients, even for the diagnostic question specifically related to lack of judgment and insight. Despite some limitations (e.g., transversal design, large variation of medications), these preliminary results support the notion that LD is associated with psychosis, but falsify the hypotheses that we set out to test. A possible explanation is that psychosis enhances the experience of internal reality in detriment of external reality, and therefore lucid dreamers with psychotic symptoms would be more able to control their internal reality than non-psychotic lucid dreamers. Training dream lucidity is likely to produce safe psychological strengthening in a non-psychotic population, but in a psychotic population LD practice may further empower deliria and hallucinations, giving internal reality the appearance of external reality.
The ontogeny of discourse structure mimics the development of literature
(2016) Mota, Natália B.; Pinheiro, Sylvia; Sigman, Mariano; Slezak, Diego Fernandez; Cecchi, Guillermo; Copelli, Mauro; Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from verbal reports of 200 subjects ages 2-58, and 676 literary texts spanning ~5,000 years. In healthy subjects, lexical diversity, graph size, and long-range recurrence departed from initial near-random levels through a monotonic asymptotic increase across ages, while short-range recurrence showed a corresponding decrease. These changes were explained by education and suggest a hierarchical development of discourse structure: short-range recurrence and lexical diversity stabilize after elementary school, but graph size and long-range recurrence only stabilize after high school. This gradual maturation was blurred in psychotic subjects, who maintained in adulthood a near-random structure. In literature, monotonic asymptotic changes over time were remarkable: While lexical diversity, long-range recurrence and graph size increased away from near-randomness, short-range recurrence declined, from above to below random levels. Bronze Age texts are structurally similar to childish or psychotic discourses, but subsequent texts converge abruptly to the healthy adult pattern around the onset of the Axial Age (800-200 BC), a period of pivotal cultural change. Thus, individually as well as historically, discourse maturation increases the range of word recurrence away from randomness.
Thought disorder measured as random speech structure classifies negative symptoms and schizophrenia diagnosis 6 months in advance
(npj Schizophrenia, 2017-04-13) Mota, Natália B.; Copelli, Mauro; Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
In chronic psychotic patients, word graph analysis shows potential as complementary psychiatric assessment. This analysis relies mostly on connectedness, a structural feature of speech that is anti-correlated with negative symptoms. Here we aimed to verify whether speech disorganization during the first clinical contact, as measured by graph connectedness, can correctly classify negative symptoms and the schizophrenia diagnosis 6 months in advance. Positive and negative syndrome scale scores and memory reports were collected from 21 patients undergoing first clinical contact for recent-onset psychosis, followed for 6 months to establish diagnosis, and compared to 21 well-matched healthy subjects. Each report was represented as a word-trajectory graph. Connectedness was measured by number of edges, number of nodes in the largest connected component and number of nodes in the largest strongly connected component. Similarities to random graphs were estimated. All connectedness attributes were combined into a single Disorganization Index weighted by the correlation with the positive and negative syndrome scale negative subscale, and used for classifications. Random-like connectedness was more prevalent among schizophrenia patients (64 × 5% in Control group, p = 0.0002). Connectedness from two kinds of memory reports (dream and negative image) explained 88% of negative symptoms variance (p < 0.0001). The Disorganization Index classified low vs. high severity of negative symptoms with 100% accuracy (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 1), and schizophrenia diagnosis with 91.67% accuracy (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.85). The index was validated in an independent cohort of chronic psychotic patients and controls (N = 60) (85% accuracy). Thus, speech disorganization during the first clinical contact correlates tightly with negative symptoms, and is quite discriminative of the schizophrenia diagnosis.

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Navegando por Autor "Mota, Natália B."