SchizoDetect has developed from basic psychoacoustic research. This started in 1983 and was trigged by findings in studies of emotional experiences of symphonic compositions. Schizophrenics as a group did not experience symphonic music in significantly different ways compared to non-schizophrenics. This was in contrast with other diagnostic groups such as depressives, anxiety neurotics, obsessive neurotics, hysterical neurotics and manic psychotics who all showed illness-specific aberrations.

The results of the schizophrenic group were unexpected with regard to the well-known general and serious disturbance of the sensory systems in the illness. They may be explained by compensatory and readapting processes in schizophrenia, not to mention the great variability seen in most schizophrenic studies, where rating methods are used.

Since then our research-group has searched for other acoustic stimuli, which may differentiate schizophrenic subjects from other diagnostic study-groups. This was supposed to be possible with specific types of acoustic stimuli, as it may be anticipated that the processing of acoustic stimuli in the schizophrenic brain is different from that of non-schizophrenics. The schizophrenic individuals report lots of aberrant acoustic experiences - the hearing of faint or reinforced sounds, including coherent "voices", and more. Their auditory perception is disturbed as a main trait of the disease. In fact, aberrant acoustic experiences are core symptoms of it.

Successive studies revealed that perceptual aberrations related to schizophrenia were possible to discover by investigating sound-illusions. These illusions target fine discrimination of elements of sound, which in turn governs the final perception. This discrimination and further synthesis of neural activity takes place in subcortical areas, i.e. at a subconscious, pre-attentive level. These processes are obviously disturbed in schizophrenia.

SchizoDetect comprises electrophysiological registration of brain-activity in connection with stimulation by schizophrenia-sensitive sound-samples.