Inside the Brains of OCD Patients

Obsessive- Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder in which individuals have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations (obsessions) and engage in behaviors in response to these thoughts (obsessions). This mental disorder can have a devastating impact on an individual's life. People who suffer from OCD acknowledge the irrationality of their behavior, however, they still feel the need to carry out the action or response.

There was a study published in Neuron, September 28th which used "mathematical modeling of decision-making" to get a clear insight into the minds affected by OCD. Matilde Vaghi reveals that OCD is a "core feature rather than a consequence of obsessions or result of inaccurate beliefs". The research Vaghi had preformed is apart of a new field of computational psychiatry. The tendency to repeat an action may be due to an impairment on how some individuals view their environment, as well as there being a lack of confidence, despite their being accurate.

Vaghi and Fabrice Luyckx at the University of Cambridge, as well as neuroeconomist and senior author Benedetto De Martino at University of College London conducted an experiment where they selected 24 people with OCD and 25 people without the disorder where they had to play a video game in which they had to move a target around a circle to catch colored dots emitted from the center of the circle. They then had to rate how confident they were in where they moved the bucket to catch the coin. The OCD individuals were consistent in where they placed the bucket, as they would tend to place it were the previous coin had landed. The healthy participants, on the other hand "closely mirrored the predictions of a mathematical model of learning whereas the actions of people with OCD deviated substantially from these predictions."

This experiment revealed that brain calculates confidence independently of action but healthy functioning depends on connecting the two. Nathaniel Daw of Princeton University states, "A number of issues in psychiatry related to compulsion have to do with a disconnect, or imbalance, between [implicit, automatic behaviors, and explicit conscious reasoning]". The study, as a whole, illustrates the potential of computational psychiatry. Furthermore, this can help with the detection and diagnosis of OCD in the future.

Orignal Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-inner-look-into-the-minds-and-brains-of-people-with-ocd1/