What causes auditory hallucinations in the brain? For example, when you are sleep deprived, it is possible to hear things very clearly as if they were real. For example, voices of people talking, which some people with schizophrenia experience commonly in their daily lives. But of course there is no input from the ears. So what exactly is happening and how is that possible?
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Normally, when you hear something, the soundwaves travel through your ear and eventually creates signals in your nerves. That signal travels to the brain, gets processed, and you hear it. So, while the ears are how you sense sounds, your brain is doing the actual hearing.
In any hallucination (auditory or otherwise), it’s the brain perceiving something despite no actual signal of the thing from your senses.
The process by which we hear something starts with a sound. This sound is a bunch of tiny changes in pressure. These changes in pressure physically move hairs in your ear. These movements trigger neurons in the ear, which send signals to the brain. Your brain interprets these signals and responds to them.
The important piece of this is that how you respond to the sound is directly related to the neurons in your brain. If I disconnected your ear neurons from your brain, no amount of sound would elicit a reaction from you. You’d just be deaf.
Hallucinations are what happens when something triggers the neurons in your brain that are usually triggered by sound. Your brain can’t differentiate between “signals from changes in pressure that move ear hairs” and “a 9 volt battery that I hooked up to the neurons connected to those hairs.” It just interprets the signals that it gets.
Auditory input is processed in parts of the thalamus, so you can hallucinate a sound when there is a signal sent to that brain centre responsible for processing sounds even there is no stimulus (such as in hallucination). High levels of serotonin (a neurotransmitter in the brain) can sometimes cause auditory hallucination (as seen with some drug use and in cases of schizophrenia). Source: my own neurology studies.
You various causes.
The first is when you hear a sound as normal, your brain then processes this sound. Now at times what you actually hear isn’t that great in terms of volume and quality, so your brain has to process it and guess what sound it is. So this part can be broken, typically it might be that you hear people chatting and you think they are talking about you.
Second might be when your internal voices and thoughts get disassociated from you, so it sounds like you are hearing voices.
Then you might have some kind of misfiring in your auditory system so it sounds like you are hearing something when there is no input. The.
That feeling like you’ve been hit by a ball in a game (or something) while you’re dozing off, making you jump out of your skin (myoclonic jerk?) – is so random. But these days (getting old) I have the auditory version. Huge noises that cause me to jump up, trying to figure out what catastrophe just occurred?! The brain is crazy 😝
It’s just your brain bypassing the necessity for input from your ears, and generating a “sound” that it perceives within itself. Essentially, you’re dreaming. Heck, auditory hallucination is how I know that I’m about to fall asleep. Once I start hearing things, I know I’ve got maybe 20 seconds before being out like a light. For me, it’s just precursory dreaming.
Think about it that way: everything youre aware of, literally everything, does not exist in the way you think it does. Youre brain creates everything you see, hear, feel… Colours and sound dont exist in youre brain or in the world. They only appear in youre consciousness. Your whole awareness is a hallucination. Thats why you dream. Youre brain can completely create your experience.
So it also can create sound that dont come from waves of air. Sound is not really sound. Its pressure in the air, your brain picks it up and create a sound out of it.
The way neurons in your brain “talk” to each other is by producing chemicals (known as neurotransmitters). One neuron sends the chemical and the next neuron recieves it. I’ll call the neurons the “sender” and the “receiver”. The space between the neurons is called the synapse. Within that space, neurotransmitters can either be recycled back into the sender or trashed (destroyed) and sent out of the system. When you hear a sound, the stimuli eventually gets to a sender neuron and it produces the chemical that tells the reciever “it’s a sound”.
I believe the neurotransmitter that is used for this is dopamine. Schitzophrenics produce too much dopamine and the extra dopamine is read by the reciever as a sound that never actually happened. Hallucinagenic drugs have similar effects. Some drugs, or biological disorders can make you produce too much of it, too little of it, block receptors –or– they can block the path for the “recyclable” neurotransmitters to go back into senders, or they can prevent “trashable” neurotransmitters from being destroyed. If that happens, the synapse can become overloaded with neurotransmitters which can also cause hallucinations.
Somewhere in there lies the answer to what happens when you hallucinate sounds before bed. Also, it should be noted producing too much dopamine is only ONE of several biological abnormalities associated with Schizophrenia. To learn more from someone who actually knows what they are talking about, Youtube Schizophrenia Stanford and look for the lecture by Professor Robert Sapolsky.
hallucinations don’t come from your ears. it’s your brain “hearing” or “imagining” or “believing it heard” something that’s not really there.
Want to know the truth? Nobody knows.
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