Is hearing voices normal? Science reveals the neural origins of hallucinations

Is hearing voices normal? This was the question that guided a study published in Psychiatry Last Thursday (2). Researchers are based on the idea that the neural roots of hallucinations lie in the way the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, and they claim that this condition is more common than one might imagine.

In the study, participants were asked to press a button that, after a split second, caused a penis to gently press against their back. The results indicate that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a sound when there was a delay between pressing the button and touching the penis.

Researchers argue, at the time, that we all hallucinate at certain times, such as when we are tired, for example.

In the study, participants also listened to recordings Pink noise, a softer version of white noise. Some recordings contain recorded parts of a person’s voice, while other recordings contain other people’s voices or no sound at all. In each test, volunteers were asked whether or not they heard someone speaking.

This rod technique has already been used in previous studies, to understand these sensations caused by the presence of someone behind you. In this new condition, when people already had that feeling of a ghostly presence, they were more likely to report hearing voices (even if there wasn’t anything there).

Why do we hear sounds?

Researchers indicate that these hallucinations may arise from difficulty recognizing a person’s actions, as well as a willingness to expect a specific outcome.

“Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in non-hallucinating individuals represents a new avenue of research aimed at understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena and avoiding the confusion observed in patients,” the study says.

“Verbal auditory hallucinations are one of the most common and distressing psychotic symptoms, the causes of which remain largely unknown. We showed that this procedure resulted in phenomena similar to auditory-verbal hallucinations in healthy subjects, which was measured as an increase in the rate of auditory-verbal hallucinations in healthy subjects, which was measured as an increase in the rate of “False alarms in a sound detection task.”

In other words, hearing voices can happen to everyone. Previously, I tried to study and understand the properties People who “hear” the voices of the dead.

source: Psychiatry

Popular on Canaltech: