OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee

The missing half: Using video games to find what’s hiding!

Imagine it is your birthday and a giant, delicious chocolate cake is sitting right in front of you. You eat every bit of the frosting and sprinkles on the right side… but you completely ignore the left side. You are still hungry, and the cake is right there, but your brain just says, ‘No, nothing more to eat here!’. For some people who have had a brain injury, like a stroke, an entire half of their world can simply disappear, even though their eyes work perfectly. But how so? The brain needs oxygen to work. It gets that oxygen from blood flowing through tiny tubes. A stroke happens when the blood suddenly stops flowing to one part of the brain. And when brain cells go without oxygen for a few minutes, they get hurt and stop doing their jobs. Think of it like a power outage in the attention department of the brain. The wires that usually connect their eyes to their focus get disconnected. Even though the eyes are seeing the world, the message never reaches the part of the brain that says, ‘Hey! Look at that!’ This is called ‘neglect.’ It means that patients might only eat half of a cake, or if they are standing in front of the world’s biggest pile of candy, they might only perceive half of it! We have discovered that some people can have very subtle symptoms that can stay for the rest of their lives, impact their behavior, but remain invisible! That’s exactly where our mission begins. By using virtual reality, touchscreen, eye- and body tracking cameras (that follow your gaze and arm movements like a hawk), we are finding those hidden symptoms. Finally, by stepping into the MRI scanner, we are looking into the patients’ brains to figure out where in the brain is the power outrage, and which cables are disconnected following these specific symptoms.

Presenters and organizers

Eugénie Cataldo is a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva.