Australian researchers

The manic depression or bipolar disease can be treated in a better manner by curious artificial visuals and may lead to diagnostic test, Australian researchers said on Tuesday.

"We know that manic depression, or bipolar disorder, is a highly heritable disorder," said neuroscientist Steven Miller of Monash University said reporting their findings in the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.'

"But the world is having a lot of trouble trying to find genes [involved in] bipolar disorder," he said.

One of the key problems is that diagnosis of manic depression can be unreliable and Miller along with his team have been trying to establish a biological marker for the disease, which could be used to complement clinical diagnosis.

They have been studying an artificially-induced visual phenomenon known as 'binocular rivalry'.

"In everyday life, the left and right eyes are looking at more or less the same thing and your brain combines both inputs, allowing you to perceive distances," Miller said.

But if each eye is given a completely different image to look at, it induces an abnormal state. Rather than combine the images, the brain first focuses on one image and then flips to the other.

"It's a perceptual flip phenomenon," Miller said.

He said the flip usually occurs on average every 1 to 2 seconds, but varies widely between individuals.