There are people who hear voices and often most of them are diagnosed with mental disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. But a minority of the population that hears voices are not suffering from any mental disorders.
Such hallucinations are a result of an imbalance of prior expectation and sensory information according to recent theories, but what remains unclear is whether such an imbalance also influences auditory-perceptual processes.
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A study from the Durham University and University College London found that people who hear voices can detect speech-like sounds more easily and quickly that people who have never had a voice-hearing experience.
A study was conducted which involved 12 voice-hearers – people who regularly hear voices (auditory verbal hallucinations), but do not have a mental health problem – and 17 non voice-hearers.
The participants listened passively to disguised speech sounds also known as sine-wave speech, while their brains were being scanned with MRI.
Usually this kind of speech sound can only be understood when people are told to listen out for speech or have been trained to decode the disguised sound.
In this study the voice-hearers recognised the hidden speech before they were told it was there. They also noticed it sooner than other participants who had no voice-hearing experience.
75 per cent of the voice-hearers reported hearing hidden speech compared to 47 per cent of non-voice hearers.
The region of the brain linked to attention and monitoring skills was automatically activated in voice-hearers, as they responded to hidden speech in the disguised sounds.
The findings of this research demonstrate that people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds and that unusual experiences that people have might be influenced by their unique perceptual and cognitive processes.
This study can ultimately help the medical community to find more effective ways in helping people who find voice-hearing disturbing.
So do you hear voices? You may just have the unusual tendency to detect meaningful speech patterns in ambiguous sounds.
Source: Brain
