Some psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (BP), can prompt the emergence of so-called psychotic states, mental states characterized by distorted thinking patterns, altered perceptions and unusual beliefs. Detecting and diagnosing these states is not always easy, as they often overlap with the symptoms of other mental health disorders, and reliable methods to identify psychosis are still lacking.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University recently carried out a study aimed at further exploring the neural signatures of psychotic states. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that the activity in the brains of individuals who are experiencing psychosis is significantly more random, following patterns that hint at an unstable flow of information.
“The measures of resting-state fMRI spatiotemporal complexity offer a powerful tool for identifying irregularities in brain activity,” Qiang Li, Jingyu Liu, and their colleagues wrote in their paper.
“To capture global brain connectivity, we employed information-theoretic metrics, overcoming the limitations of pairwise correlation analysis approaches. This enables a more comprehensive exploration of higher-order interactions and multiscale intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) in the psychotic brain.”
Brainquake: Disrupted and intricate connectivity patterns
As part of their study, the researchers scanned the brains of individuals diagnosed with BP or schizophrenia using fMRI. This is an established imaging technique that maps the activity in different parts of the brain by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygenation.
They looked at the complexity of the activity patterns in the participants’ brains. Moreover, they tried to understand how information flowed between different brain regions, used tools rooted in information theory. Specifically, they tried to measure the overlapping of information (i.e., redundancy) and combination of information (i.e., synergy) within specific brain networks.
“In this study, we provide converging evidence suggesting that the psychotic brain exhibits states of randomness across both spatial and temporal dimensions,” wrote Li, Liu and their colleagues.
“To further investigate these disruptions, we estimated brain network connectivity using redundancy and synergy measures, aiming to assess the integration and segregation of topological information in the psychotic brain. Our findings reveal a disruption in the balance between redundant and synergistic information, a phenomenon we term brainquake in this study, which highlights the instability and disorganization of brain networks in psychosis.”
They found that this “brainquake” disruption resulted in a widespread instability across several neural networks involved in the processing of emotions and sensory information, as well as memory and other mental functions.
“Our exploration of higher-order topological functional connectivity reveals profound disruptions in brain information integration,” wrote the authors.
“Aberrant information interactions were observed across both cortical and subcortical ICNs. We specifically identified the most easily affected irregularities in the sensorimotor, visual, temporal, default mode, and fronto-parietal networks, as well as in the hippocampal and amygdalar regions, all of which showed disruptions.”
Towards an improved understanding of BP and schizophrenia
The results gathered by Li, Liu and their colleagues shed new light on the intricate disruptions in brain activity associated with psychosis. In the future, the “brainquake” imbalance and the overall patterns of instability they detected could be examined further, with the aim of better understanding their link to specific dimensions of psychotic disorders.
“Our findings underscore the severe impact of psychotic states on multiscale critical brain networks, suggesting a profound alteration in the brain’s complexity and organizational states,” wrote the authors.
The insight gathered by this research team could eventually also inform the development of more effective and reliable strategies to diagnose psychotic disorders and assess their severity. This could in turn help to better plan the treatment of these disorders and determine whether specific therapeutic interventions are working.
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More information
Qiang Li et al, Spatiotemporal complexity in the psychotic brain, Molecular Psychiatry (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03367-5.
Journal information:
Molecular Psychiatry
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