Hearing voices, or auditory hallucination, is not uncommon with people who have a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses – but it also occurs in those who have none. Five to thirteen percent of adults will hear voices at some point during their lives – in circumstances that may be related to spiritual belief, bereavement, trauma, sensory deprivation, impairment – or mental and emotional distress.
What our brain does when taking in information is make its best guess, trying to fit a meaningful pattern to those signals that make sense of the world for us. For people who hear voices, their brains spend more time looking for meaningful patterns, trying to find the signal amidst the noise.
In a research study one participant said:
- “I did not hear the voices aurally. They were much more intimate than that, and inescapable. It’s hard to describe how I could ‘hear’ a voice that wasn’t auditory; but the words the voices used and the emotions they contained (hatred and disgust) were completely clear, distinct, and unmistakable, maybe even more so than if I had heard them aurally.”
This type of auditory hallucination is every author’s desire. It would make describing things so much easier if a person had a helping hand.
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