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New technology that monitors how people view images suggests that schizophrenics really do see the world differently.  

People with schizophrenia, a group of mental disorders causing symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, look at faces differently to other people, researchers have found. 

This may help explain why they often have difficulty communicating. In the long term, the researchers believe their work may lead to a relatively simple addition to therapy, by training patients to "read" faces differently to improve their ability to understand others. 

The project found schizophrenics tend to ignore the right side of a face at first glance, whereas people without the disorder follow a triangular pattern, moving from the left to right eye to mouth and up to the left eye again. 

But the study, comparing 30 people with schizophrenia with 30 people in a control group, found both groups viewed a geometric pattern in similar ways. 

Professor Russell Meares, professor of psychiatry at Westmead Hospital, who is conducting the research with Dr Evian Gordon and Mr Barry Manor, said yesterday it was "extraordinary" that the perceptual differences seemed to be peculiar to faces, although the brain was known to have special systems for processing faces. "What is very strange is that people with this illness process most of the world adequately - it's as if there is another system which is to do with peculiarly interpersonal aspects of living that may be disrupted," he said. 

Professor Meares said the results helped explain why schizophrenics often had difficulty integrating information, as much communication relied on interpreting facial expressions. 

The researchers hope the technology, which calculates 50 times a second precisely where the eye is looking at an image on a screen while monitoring brain function, will also provide insights into the brain's workings in many other disorders. 

A spokesman for the Schizophrenia Fellowship said the findings were exciting because they offered clues about what was going wrong and what could be done about it. 

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