DURHAM, England — Hearing voices may not be a sign of mental illness as much as it’s a clue that a person’s brain is simply well-tuned to many sounds. A new study finds that healthy people who hear voices have differently-wired brains that find speech patterns in other sounds.
Researchers from Durham University studied brain-response differences between two groups of people — those who have experienced hearing voices (auditory verbal hallucinations) and those who have never mistaken other sounds for speech. Participants in the study included 17 people with typical responses to sounds and 12 people who have experienced hearing voices, but do not have any mental health problems.
Participants underwent an MRI brain scan while listening to hidden speech sounds, known as sine-wave speech. Sine-wave speech to the untrained ear would sound something like birdsong or alien-type noises. Typically, people are able to make out these sounds only after they have been clued in to listen for them or taught to decode the hidden speech sounds. After people are trained, though, they can detect simple sentences within the sounds, such as “The clown had a funny face.”
Researchers found that less than half of those with typical listening skills noticed the hidden speech while 75 percent of the voice-hearers picked it up.
“It suggests that the brains of people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds,” says lead author Dr. Ben Alderson-Day in a university release.
Researchers were surprised that the voice-hearers had such strong neural responses to the sounds with hidden speech. Even before being told to listen for hidden speech, voice-hearers reported hearing the voices in the sounds. They found speech-like sounds faster and more easily than those who have never experienced the phenomenon of hearing voices.
“We did not tell the participants that the ambiguous sounds could contain speech before they were scanned, or ask them to try to understand the sounds. Nonetheless, these participants showed distinct neural responses to sounds containing disguised speech, as compared to sounds that were meaningless,” adds co-author Dr. Cesar Lima.
The authors believe this shows that the brains of voice-hearers are more perceptive to the hidden meanings in sounds. The areas of the brain that control attention were quickly activated in the brains of voice-hearers when they were exposed to hidden speech compared to when they were listening to vague sounds.
“These findings are a demonstration of what we can learn from people who hear voices that are not distressing or problematic,” says Alderson-Day.
Between 5 and 15 percent of the population has occasionally had the experience of hearing voices. Although not everyone who hears voices has a mental health problem, it is commonly associated with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Researchers hope their findings could someday help scientists and clinicians find better ways to help those who are troubled by the voices they hear.
The study’s findings were published in the academic journal Brain.
I know the voices in my head are not real. …, but sometimes they have really good ideas.
When I hear them. I know better than to ask others if they hear them, too.
Not all is bad. I sit alone in the subway.
it seems Terra Marquette IS AN ORNATE BUILDING OF AMORPHOUS GENDER
Sometimes I wrestle with my demons. Sometimes we snuggle.
The voices are real, my head isn’t. Problem solved.
Back in the ’60s when I was taking abnormal psychology courses, hearing voices was considered a primary symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.
But you that was before the inmates were running the asylum, now if your normal then you must be crazy!
True dat!
And being trans or gay was an illness.
during my most recent MRI, i distinctly heard the magnet say “do it, do it, do it, do it, do, do, do, do…” and then it got really demanding and pushy about it. NOT joking.
That was most likely magnetostriction of your brain. Things may have gotten a little soggy. Avoid iron objects for a week, stay away from compasses and Tesla autos.
A sample size of 29 does not provide any meaningful data.
Seriously that’s all they collected and they published the findings?
Luke, this is your father! Do not follow the Force!
My first reaction was “so what?” I guess if they can figure out how to treat those of us who are tortured by hearing voices in their head it may lead to something good. I wonder who is paying for this research. Hopefully that wasn’t in the article as I only skimmed it.
Oh thank God I’m OK……shut up, who ask you!
I took a medication one time that had my brain trying to make speech-sense out of very ordinary noises. Wind in the trees, for example, sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. An electric motor would sound like somebody mumbling. They weren’t “voices” so much as the verbal side of my brain trying to pick speech out of noises going by. I thought it was creepy and I stopped taking that stuff.
Step away from the mushrooms!
I hear voices in my head all the time. They’re my buds.
Hearing voices because your brain is wired differently pretty much qualifies as a mental defect,
Interesting. When I was a teenager I used to hear my mother calling me whenever I was mowing the lawn.
I just ignored it figuring I was “just hearing things.”
After I had kids of my own I figured out what I was actually hearing was “Shut the damn mower off I’m trying to sleep.”
Yeah and I did another study it showed that 98% of all studies are total bullshit and used to get money so the people doing studies never have to really work.
If you hear voices in your head you are a freaking nutzoid
well tuned alright… just not to planet Earth
Beware if you hear “The clown with the funny face wants to have you for dinner”
If it’s true, how many perfectly sane people have been drugged senseless and/or locked up by pshrinks for experiencing this?
This is actually true. The harmonics of all machines noises can resonate in the human mind as words. A fan, has a bearing that is slightly unstable. The resultant noise from it can cause the human brain to try to attempt to put the sound into human speech. It is like the visual of our brain putting together a face on a piece of stone (stone markings) when no face exists in reality. This audible form of machine language has happened to me. Had I not known what it was, I would have been driven mad by it.
This is actually true. The harmonics of all machines noises can resonate
in the human mind as words. A fan, has a bearing that is slightly
unstable. The resultant noise from it can cause the human brain to try
to attempt to put the sound into human speech. It is like the visual of
our brain putting together a face on a piece of stone (stone markings)
when no face exists in reality (example – The Face On Mars). This
audible form of machine language has happened to me. Had I not known
what it was, I would have been driven mad by it. I reasoned it out. I
knew this along time ago, scientists. It doesn’t matter, NO ONE WILL LISTEN.