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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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.
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