On July 5th, Marouska van Ommen defended her thesis “Insight into visual hallucinations in psychotic disorders: behavioral and fMRI studies”. Hallucinations, the perception of things that are not physically there, are a core symptom of psychotic disorders. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of visual hallucinations (VH), which hinders the development of targeted therapies. Marouska’s doctoral research aimed to better understand these mechanisms. She concludes that visual hallucinations (VH) arise from a lack of communication between the brain region where visual signals from the external world enter (V1) and the brain networks that further process these signals. The thesis can be found here. The featured image visualizes a hallucination of a ‘dove flying over water’ described by a patient and generated using AI.
Depiction of Marouska’s defense, by Michiel Cleij