Brain Science | Psychiatry—VR for Mental Health Diagnosis
There is no test for mental health as well as for psychiatric disorders. Questionnaires and surveys are often used to assess conditions and intensity.
Though helpful, they sometimes lead to misdiagnosis, overmedication, substance abuse, extreme behaviors and so on because surveys are not encompassing.
This guest post below by David Stephen explores virtual reality [VR] as an option to test for mental health and illness, based directly on the two present elements in any condition: thought and memory.
Can VR help with Mental Health Diagnosis?
Thoughts are numerous, but often have different qualities at different instances. Thought status per experience largely decides what becomes of mental health. Displaying the order of thought, then directions of disorder would expose the mind, using those poles, for better designs to care.
Neuroscience: Thought—Memory VR Display for Mental Health Tests
Thoughts are not just elements for thinking. They are existential mechanisms the brain expresses for being. There is no separation between what things are to the brain and the form with which thinking is done.
An individual cannot think about anything that does not exist as a form of thought to the brain. To think about the window is because the window is in the same form it is thought about. The window is a thought: worry, happiness, checking its state, cleaning, looking out through are all expressed as forms of thought, in decisions, what becomes known, how to understand, what to remember, expect, and so on.
The how, what, when, which, where, who and so on of anything or anyone is because they exist as thoughts to the brain. Thought and its form is used for imaginations, dreams, predictions, inner voice, language, other people’s voice, subvocalization, and so on.
Thought and memory are the construct of cells and molecules of the brain for experiential interactions.
The brain places mental health based on how thought transports across. There are problems of mind where thoughts are too fast, too slow, too repetitive or intrusive, too prompting, too scattered and so on.
There are some also, like in delusions and hallucinations—where thoughts don’t get to certain stores or locations, precluding them from limits in [social, cultural, economic and political standards] for interactions with the world.
Thoughts can be prioritized or pre-prioritized, interchanges between both are numerous, but with prioritized, it is difficult to be neutral, because after thoughts [in stores] go across memory locations, they proceed to where feelings are, before reaction.
Where do thoughts go to mean what is experienced? Do thoughts acquire properties as they go along? Some words hurt and linger, why? When there is sometimes no mood to work or study, there is a feel-like to scroll pictures or see videos, how does thought decide?
Though there is the common allusion to reward or pleasure, but decisions are not necessarily for those. There are thoughts that can displace cravings, sleep, delight and so on.
Whatever their molecular mechanisms, other things can overpower them, showing that they are all thought and memory constructs, under an overall placement prioritization.
What rules do thoughts follow in the brain to give experiences? What is the universe of thought in the brain for complete existential consciousness—regardless of state?
Neuroimaging does not show thought, albeit activity centers lighten up. What thoughts are, leaps a few spots, skipping steps and telling a slight story.
Neurotechnology accesses a regimented segment of thought in the cortical areas for imagination and motor skills, but thoughts have an expanse beyond those.
This presents an opening for VR with a conceptual model on the transport of thought in the brain, to show order and disorder to know where thoughts are when someone screams, smiles, is interested, uninterested, scared, biased, depressed, anxious and so on.
It can also show how anxiety leads to physical sensations, or how there are early-splits or go-before in memory areas, displaying expectation—disappointment beams, exceeding the terms predictive coding and processing.
VR can, for psychiatry and mental health.
In brain science, all senses converge—in the thalamus, except for smell that converges at the olfactory bulb—where they are processed or integrated before relay to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
Sensory processing is postulated to be into a new identity or a uniform unit or processing which is thought or a form of thought. It is what becomes the version, representation, equivalent, build or construct for senses?—?internal or external?—?that came in. This is how the window became a form of thought or the image on social media that caused outrage, happiness, sadness and so on.
This is how the brain creates the mind. It begins what becomes conscious experiences: creating the quantity of integration, or relaying unit to transport across the brain.
Interpretation in the cerebral cortex is theorized to be knowing, feeling and reaction. Knowing is memory. Memory stores thought in micro and macro packages. Micro with least possible unique information on things, macro with collection of similarities between micro.
Micro relays in different sequences to stores makes determination for what to feel-like, remember, desire and so on, before the thought goes to the feeling destination and then for reaction.
There is a principal spot for macro stores in memory where they dominate the most. Micro stores relaying may touch the macro store of anger to feel that way about something, similar to trauma, and so on. Thoughts acquire properties along with contacts or visits.
These can be displayed with VR, giving it an exclusive solution in advancing care, changing the future of psychiatry.
David Stephen does research in theoretical neuroscience. He has a research experience in computer vision at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He blogs on troic.medium.com
See more breaking stories here.