Are these voices part of our character or are they distinct characters we’ve never met? How can these mental voices just leave after medications?
In: Biology
Just remember, anything that gets processed in the brain can get processed incorrectly. Something in your brain is tracking where your fingers are, and you can misplace them (mostly gently; i.e., you brush your own leg and don’t realize it was yourself until you look). Something is tracking that the color of a ball is actually connected to that ball and not just a floating color in space.
Schizophrenia is still being researched. We aren’t 100% certain, but one theory is that the hallucinations (perhaps in general) are just “source errors.” Source errors are a thing that happen to anyone, but typically, it’s where you misremember something as coming from yourself. For example, a friend tells you a cool idea, then days later, you have that idea but mistakenly think it is your idea that you came up with.
In schizophrenia, it’s the other way around: they are listening to their own thoughts, but the part of their brains that’s meant to track the source is not working as intended. So it feels like the voice is not their own. And clearly, this is something that CAN happen. People dream, and the people in their dreams talk but SEEM to be other people. What separates “I imagined” from “I heard” is just the ability to track the source.
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