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?
In: 677
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.
Latest Answers