will take place on Tuesday, November 11th, 2025 from 16:00 to 17:00 hours in the CBBM Building, Ground Floor, Seminar Room Levi-Montalcini.
Host: Prof. Dr. med. Rebekka Lencer
Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie
Abstract: Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) lead us to question many things we take for granted. For example they experience a breakdown of the experience of time continuity. When exploring their timing abilities, they appear to have huge difficulties to consciously detect an onset asynchrony between two visual stimuli, but are incidentally disturbed by very short, millisecond-level asynchronies. This fragmentation may explain that patients do not benefit from the passage of time like neurotypicals do. It may contribute to their disorders of the sense of self, by impeding a sense of self continuity in time. I will shortly summarize the results obtained to date and propose a tentative model, before discussing the meaning of these difficulties in everyday life. I will also present preliminary data suggesting a therapeutic path, i.e. time manipulations within virtual reality. In all the results suggest the fragility of our sense of time continuity, not only because it is disturbed in patients, but also because it can be restaured by a simple optic flow that is not even truly continuous.
