Neuroscience
The case of a woman who started hearing speech-impaired voices after a bike accident, has lent support to the idea that auditory hallucinations can be caused by people misidentifying their own inner voice as not belonging to them.
The 63-year-old woman was unconscious for a week and was only able to communicate in short phrases after coming around, probably because of the extensive damage she suffered to the left-hand side of her brain (a condition known as aphasia).
A few months later she developed signs of epilepsy and started hearing voices that weren't there – at first the voices sounded like her own but from the outside, then she heard the voices of hospital staff. In both cases, these hallucinatory voices spoke in very simple and short sentences mirroring her own real-life speech deficit. When her seizures were controlled with drugs, her auditory hallucinations stopped, suggesting epilepsy was the underlying physiological cause of her hearing voices.
The fact the woman heard voices that shared her speech impairment provides unique support for the popular hypothesis that people with psychosis who hear voices do so because they are misidentifying their own inner speech as coming from outside the self.
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Hubl, D., Hauf, M., van Swam, C., Muri, R., Dierks, T. & Strik, W. (2007). Hearing dysphasic voices. The Lancet, 370, 538.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Woman hears speech-impaired voices
The case of a woman who started hearing speech-impaired voices after a bike accident, has lent support to the idea that auditory hallucinations can be caused by people misidentifying their own inner voice as not belonging to them.The 63-year-old woman was unconscious for a week and was only able to communicate in short phrases after coming around, probably because of the extensive damage she suffered to the left-hand side of her brain (a condition known as aphasia).
A few months later she developed signs of epilepsy and started hearing voices that weren't there – at first the voices sounded like her own but from the outside, then she heard the voices of hospital staff. In both cases, these hallucinatory voices spoke in very simple and short sentences mirroring her own real-life speech deficit. When her seizures were controlled with drugs, her auditory hallucinations stopped, suggesting epilepsy was the underlying physiological cause of her hearing voices.
The fact the woman heard voices that shared her speech impairment provides unique support for the popular hypothesis that people with psychosis who hear voices do so because they are misidentifying their own inner speech as coming from outside the self.
___________________________________
Hubl, D., Hauf, M., van Swam, C., Muri, R., Dierks, T. & Strik, W. (2007). Hearing dysphasic voices. The Lancet, 370, 538.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- You Hear A Voice In Your Head When You're Reading, Right?
As you're reading this blog post silently to yourself, do you hear an inner voice speaking the words in your head? A new paper published in Psychosis suggests that most people do hear an internal voice when they're reading. But as this is one...
- The Voices Heard By People With Schizophrenia Are Friendlier In India And Africa, Than In The Us
When a patient with schizophrenia hears voices in their head, is the experience shaped by the culture they live in? Tanya Luhrmann and her colleagues investigated by interviewing twenty people diagnosed with schizophrenia living in San Mateo, California;...
- What's It Like To Hear Voices That Aren't There?
Traditionally, when a person says they can hear voices that don't exist in external reality (not to be confused with inner speaking), psychiatry has treated this as a sign of mental illness. However, it's become clear in recent years that many...
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It isn't just people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who claim to hear voices inside their heads. Many other people do too. However, a key difference between psychiatric and non-psychiatric voice hearers is that the latter usually claim not to be...
- Fmri Neuroimaging Of Neural Control Over Speech
Inside the mind of an actor (literally) How does an actor engage with the part they are playing? Fiona Shaw undergoes a brain scan while reciting TS Eliot to help shed some light on the mystery Stuart Jeffries The Guardian Tuesday 24 November 2009 [snip]...