Joan of Arc described hearing the voices of saints telling her to free her country from the English. Hallucinated voices are also known to occur during states of religious or creative inspiration. Our brains are primed to register such events so on rare occasions, the brain makes a mistake and reconstructs unrelated sounds (such as people talking indistinctly) into a false perception of the spoken name. But hearing voices is not necessarily a sign of mental illness, so understanding the mechanics of auditory hallucinations is crucial to understanding schizophrenia and related disorders.įor example, your occasional illusionary perception of your name spoken in a crowd occurs because this utterance is uniquely important. One patient described the recurrence of voices as akin to being "in a constant state of mental rape." In the worst cases, voices command the listener to undertake destructive acts such as suicide or assault. Often certain actual external sounds, such as fans or running water, become transformed into perceived speech. The sound of the voice is sometimes that of a family member or someone from one's past, or is like that of no known person but has distinct and immediately recognizable features (say, a deep, growling voice). The compelling aura of reality about these experiences often produces distress and disrupts thought and behavior. For these individuals, instead of hearing just one's name, voices produce a stream of speech, often vulgar or derogatory ("You are a fat whore," "Go to hell") or a running commentary on one's most private thoughts. This foray into the uncanny is as close as most people come to experiencing auditory hallucinations or "hearing voices," a condition that affects 70% of patients with schizophrenia and 15% of patients with mood disorders such as mania or depression. It dawns on you that the voice you heard must have sprung from your own mind. You are in a crowd when you hear your name. Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University Hearing Voices: Hearing What Others Can't Hear
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