‘Hearing voices’ has become a phrase synonymous with mental illness. But auditory hallucinations are a lot more common than many realise – in fact, as many as 1 in 8 people will ‘hear voices’ at some point in their life.
And what’s more, if we consider how the hearing of voices has contributed to some of the core elements of a number of religions, we might be quite startled to find that it has had a rather large influence on the world we live in. And yet very little research has been done on the topic until now.
To help gain a better understanding of this strange phenomenon, a research team from Durham and Stanford Universities designed an open-ended online questionnaire in which they asked people to describe, in their own words, what they experienced. It was completed by 153 people with a range of diagnoses, including 26 who had never had a psychiatric diagnosis.
Their findings have just been released in a new paper published by The Lancet, titled “Experiences of hearing voices: analysis of a novel phenomenological survey“. For TL;DR sufferers, they also have summarised their results on the Hearing the Voice website:
Public perception is that hearing voices is always a symptom of severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and psychosis, and that the voices people experience are loud, commanding and dangerous. Our study confirmed previous research that challenges these assumptions, finding that people hear many different kinds of voices (some with strong characterful qualities); and that despite associations with negative emotions such as fear, anxiety and depression, many people also hear positive and supportive voices.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the study’s findings call in to question the presumption that voice-hearing is always and exclusively an auditory experience. While many of the participants said that the voices they heard were similar to hearing somebody speaking in the same room, 10% of participants reported purely ‘thought-like’ voices with no acoustic properties, and a further 40% reported ‘mixed’ voices that had both thought-like and auditory characteristics. These findings challenge the view that hearing voices is necessarily a perceptual or auditory phenomenon, and may also have implications for future neuroscientic studies of what it is happening in the brain when people ‘hear’ voices.
Our study also found that changes in emotion and bodily sensations often accompany voice-hearing experiences. 66% of participants reported alterations in the way their body felt while hearing voices, such as feeling hot or tingling sensations in their hands and feet. Nearly 20% of participants experienced ‘multi-sensory’ voices, suggesting that their voices were ‘perceived’ simultaneously through more than one sensory modality. Interestingly, it was voices with effects on the body that were more likely to be abusive and violent; and in some cases, were linked to previous experiences of trauma, such as bullying, neglect, and physical and sexual abuse.
Link: Hearing the Voice
Paper (full-text): “Experiences of hearing voices: analysis of a novel phenomenological survey“
