The 2021 Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers was awarded to Lucie Berkovitch, post-doctoral fellow in neuroscience, for her work on schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia and consciousness anomalies

Lucie Berkovitch is interested in consciousness, which can be defined as the ability to have accessible and communicable mental images of oneself and the environment. She studies consciousness abnormalities in schizophrenia, a complex mental illness that affects about 1% of the general population.

Schizophrenia patients have psychotic symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations. During her PhD research, Dr. Berkovitch observed that they can subliminally process information but their consciousness has trouble accessing it. This could be due to attention and brain connectivity disorders.

Reproducing schizophrenia symptoms with psychotropic substances

Dr. Berkovitch will do a post-doctoral fellowship in Alan Anticevic's laboratory at Yale to delve further into the mechanisms of schizophrenia.

She will experiment by administering two substances to healthy subjects to induce effects similar to certain schizophrenia symptoms to find out if attention and the state of consciousness play a causal role in psychotic episodes. One of the substances, ketamine, produces changes in consciousness (it is anaesthetic in high doses) and temporary psychotic symptoms. The other, psilocybin, is the active substance in hallucinogenic mushrooms, but its effects on consciousness and attention have not yet been studied. Dr. Berkovitch aims to study their effects on the brain in two conditions: - At rest, to observe changes in brain connectivity and activity during the onset of psychotic symptoms, - In action, when the subjects perform visual tasks to assess their awareness and attention level.

There is still a long way to go to understand the causes of schizophrenia, but this study will shed light on the neurobiological mechanisms of psychotic symptoms.

Lucie Berkovitch in a few words

Lucie Berkovitch obtained her psychiatrist’s degree in 2019. She is a member of the ALIUS community, which fosters interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers studying consciousness.

For her PhD work under the direction of Raphaël Gaillard and Stanislas Dehaene, she showed that patients with schizophrenia have abnormalities in brain activity when their attention is called upon. She also observed that patients with psychotic symptoms have anomalies in accessing consciousness and alterations in their brain connectivity.

After her PhD, Dr. Berkovitch became assistant clinical director of a unit specializing in treatment-resistant psychiatric diseases at Saint Anne’s Hospital while developing a research project on consciousness at the Brain and Spinal Cord Institute in Paris.

During her post-doctoral fellowship in the United States, Dr. Berkovitch will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the effect of substances capable of disrupting consciousness and generating psychotic symptoms, which will allow her to go further in her work.

Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers

Created in 1990, the Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers is one of the first initiatives of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. Until 2021, this prize was awarded each year to 14 young doctors of science or doctors of medicine, to enable them to carry out their post-doctoral stay in the best foreign laboratories. 349 young researchers were distinguished. The prize endowment was €25,000.

All the award-winners