Hallucinations of the inner body

One of the least understood symptoms in psychosis are hallucinations called cenesthesias. These are ‘inner body’ feelings that often don’t correspond to any known or even possible bodily experiences.

A team from Japan has just published a study of patients who experience cenesthesias in the mouth. Here are a selection of the hallucinations:

“Feels like gas is blowing up in his mouth”, “feels like something is struggling, as if there is an animal in his mouth”

“Feels the presence of wires in the mandibular incisors [front teeth in the jaw] when removing dentures”

“Feels something sticky coming up rapidly in her mouth”, “feels like a membrane is covering and squeezing her incisors”

“Feels like trash is coming up behind her dentures”, “feels sliminess in her mouth”

“Feels slimy saliva”, “feels like her teeth are made of iron and is sore from chewing”

The study used a type of brain scanning called SPECT (essentially, injecting your brain with radioactive glucose, seeing where it ends up with a gamma camera) to look at the balance of activity over the two hemispheres when the patients were just resting.

They found that activity was relatively greater in the right hemisphere, which is a common, but not very reliable finding in psychosis research.

 

Link to locked study.