Synchronization analysis of multi-channel EEG of schizophrenic during working-memory tasks

A leading hypothesis suggests that schizophrenic patients suffer from a "disconnection syndrome". A failure in functional connectivity curtails the cortical integration and network activation needed to perform working memory tasks. Multichannel EEG from 10 healthy people (control) and 10 schizophrenics have been used for the comparison of several channel synchronization-feature extraction methods such as correlation-coefficient, coherence, Omega complexity. In this study EEG samples are obtained selectively at the delay epochs of a delayed response working memory task. Results of the above methods indicate a difference in brain activity fronto- temporal channels between control and patient groups, indicating a lack of synchronization alteration ability in the patient group. These findings propose that schizophrenics probably "fail" to alter the neural networks of the temporal regions, networks involved in computation of the working memory task. A study of the evoke potential of the same data revealed no explicit waveform which indicates a working memory process, in either group. The latter indicates that the process is of a frequency-energy nature rather than of a temporal-transient one.