different types of auditory hallucinations

These are theories that the brain concocts to explain how a foreign voice could infiltrate a mind, know it intimately, and torment its victim with relentless surveillance. It’s no accident that schizophrenic patients reach for spy agencies, religious entities, or supernatural forces when describing the voices in their heads. It compensates for the presence of auditory hallucinations, caused by a defect in self-recognition, by writing a narrative to account for them.

The brain is a master storyteller, designed to make sense of the chaos of our lives. If the agent has been spying on Brandon for a while, that would explain why the voice seems to know so much about him. If an agent had implanted a chip in his brain, that would explain the voice in his head. Who could project a voice into Brandon’s mind who isn’t in his vicinity? Perhaps someone with access to impressive technologies-someone with the means and motivation to spy on him. The brain tries to generate the most logical explanation it can. This result meant that when the schizophrenics were hearing voices in their heads, their vocal muscles were contracting-they were engaging in subvocal speech. When Gould compared the EMG recordings of schizophrenic patients as they experienced auditory hallucinations to those of nonhallucinating patients, he found that, when the patients were hearing voices, their EMG recordings showed greater vocal muscle activation. He gathered a group of schizophrenic and healthy patients and, one by one, recorded their vocal muscle activity. Are the experiences that schizophrenics describe as having “voices in their heads” merely the unintentional mutterings of the speech muscles? If so, why would schizophrenics happen to notice their subvocal speech while healthy people do not? Gould designed an experiment using a technique called electromyography, or EMG, which measures muscle activation through time. The psychiatrist Louis Gould wanted to know whether auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia have anything to do with the phenomenon of subvocal speech.

Different types of auditory hallucinations