Michael-Paul Schallmo
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Some people see a constant layer of flickering specks, like television static, laid over everything they look at. This condition is called visual snow syndrome (VSS).
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
visual snow syndrome
visual perception
visual adaptation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Test whether visual snow arises from excess spontaneous neural activity in visual brain areas by comparing adaptation-based perception tests in people with visual snow syndrome and normally sighted controls.
- Measure differences in visual brain activity between people with visual snow syndrome and controls using functional MRI (fMRI), a scan that tracks blood-flow changes tied to neural activity, to locate where the snow percept arises.
- Compare brain chemistry in visual areas of people with and without visual snow syndrome using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), which estimates chemical levels in a chosen brain region.
More about the research
It can make everyday tasks such as reading and driving difficult. Its cause is unknown, and there is no effective treatment. The team recently found that visual adaptation can briefly reduce the snow. Visual adaptation means that prolonged viewing of an image changes how the next images look. This finding gives researchers a new handle on what is going wrong in the brain.
Why it matters
People living with visual snow syndrome currently have no effective treatment and no objective way to confirm their diagnosis. Finding where and how excess brain activity produces the snow could lead to new treatment strategies. It could also yield objective tests and biomarkers, which are measurable signs of the disorder. These could improve diagnosis, show whether a treatment is working, and improve quality of life for patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Heather Shappell
Wake Forest University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics·Early-career
Develop a unified statistical framework that estimates whole-brain functional networks from fMRI and how those networks change over seconds to minutes during a scan.
Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
Jasmin Cloutier
University of Delaware, DE·Psychology
Compare brain activity, measured with functional MRI, while people form first impressions of human versus artificial intelligence (AI) partners.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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