Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Brice Martin, Marc Wittmann, Nicolas Franck et al.
87 citations
Disturbances of the minimal self—the immediate sense of being a subject of experience—may be a core feature of schizophrenia, manifesting as an altered sense of presence or difficulty distinguishing self from non-self. These disturbances are not correlated with common cognitive impairments like working-memory or attention disorders. This paper reviews literature suggesting a link between such self-disturbances and alterations in time processing, including both implicit temporal integration windows and explicit duration perception. The authors argue that understanding the relationship between time and the minimal self, along with embodiment issues, requires further research focused on implicit time processing.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2018
Brice Martin, Nicolas Franck, Michel Cermolacce et al.
32 citations
Distortions in the automatic sense of time may be linked to disturbances in the minimal self in schizophrenia, but timing deficits are hard to measure objectively. This case report describes AF, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia and no antipsychotic medication, who shows few symptoms and normal cognition but high levels of minimal self disorders. In a variable foreperiod task, AF preserved the ability to distinguish time intervals but had difficulty using the passage of time to anticipate a visual stimulus and struggled to adapt to changing time delays. The impairments were large enough to detect at the individual level. Results suggest that exploring timing deficits individually is feasible and may relate to self disorders.
PsyCh journal
March 1, 2019
Brice Martin, Nicolas Franck, Anne Giersch
14 citations
People with schizophrenia often describe disruptions in their sense of time, such as a loss of time continuity, alongside other distortions of self-experience like inner emptiness and confusion between self and others. Phenomenologists interpret these as a breakdown of the temporal structure of consciousness, possibly due to difficulty retaining past information and predicting future events. Experimental psychology supports this, showing deficits in predicting sequences of events at the millisecond level. However, the authors reflect on the limits of both phenomenological and experimental approaches and caution against premature conclusions about the underlying mechanisms, aiming instead to deepen understanding of schizophrenia.
April 1, 2018
Patrick Poncelet, Franck, Nicolas, Martin, B. (Brice) et al.
Stabilized patients with schizophrenia can expect well-learned sensory signals and react to unusual events to some extent, but those who report feeling not immersed in the world (a measure of minimal self disorders) do not benefit from the passage of time to react faster. In a motor task, patients' feeling of control drops as soon as an imperceptible delay is introduced in haptic feedback, whereas controls tolerate such delays. Patients also have difficulty adjusting sensory anticipation when feedback is delayed. The results suggest a link between disrupted time expectation and minimal self disorders; fragile time expectations may contribute to a sense of discontinuity that disrupts bodily signals and the sense of self.