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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One type of auditory hallucinations, and not sure I am getting the spelling, hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations. The first thing to mention is these are very very common and by themselves are no indication of any mental health issues. The difference between the two is one occurs as you are falling asleep, the other is while waking up and can sometimes also be associated with sleep paralysis. That said, some of these can be quite scary. I had one where I woke up in a hotel (for real) while on vacation as a kid and there was a guy standing at the end of the bed with black sack over his head. It was as real as life, nothing dream like it whatsoever. He was dressed in black, had gloves on and I could actually see the seems of the leather gloves as he was holding one hand up. Just stood there looking at me. Finally made a break for it to my parents room and they come in and nothing was there. Said I had a bad dream. Never have I confused a “dream” with real life, dreams are, well, dreamy. This was me waking up terrified out of my mind that there is a crazy man with a black sack over his head there to do me harm (as far as I can tell). So this is in fact a good example of these types of hallucinations. In my case my hallucination was visible. So what is going on in the brain that you see things not there? In this case you have dreams intruding into your waking state. These don’t last long, at most a minute, the reason being as you become fully biologically awake dreams don’t intrude in your wakened state and the hallucination goes away. Mine lasted maybe 30 seconds but was hard to tell since I was so terrified that I was about to be murdered or something. That to is characteristic of these types of hallucination for whatever reason. Having someone in your room you perceive to do you harm is very common type of these hallucinations and often have common general characteristics between them of which mine fits in.
Now most people have had these kinds of hallucinations. If you are falling asleep and you hear a crashing sound that startles you back to full wakefulness and yet find no cause for it, it it often one of these hallucinations. Or you are dozing off and you hear clear as day a voice say something to you. Could be a voice you know, or just a voice. I have had both of these types over my life, maybe one or two a year and for me, except the masked man, my always happen as I am dozing off. They are very very common and are not linked to mental health issues. And the later ones I described are the same thing. The voice of my mother I sometimes hear as dozing off, yet she lives in another state. What is that voice and what is happening in your brain? Again a dream is intruding into your waking, or partially awake mind. The difference is these don’t feel “dreamy” as you are still mostly awake, so they seem more like real life. Many attribute these to ghost and paranormal stuff. I can understand why but that is not what is happening.
I can’t speak on whether someone who is schizophrenic is experiencing. But I can say, some how an audio event is being “presented” if you will to your conscious mind as something that is being heard, except the part of the brain involved in hearing is having some problem and presents voices or sounds as if you heard them but in this case the ear and the sounds it collects is not responsible for the brain in this case coming up with a signal indicating hearing something.
I have multiple forms of tinnitus. At some times, it sounds like voices (usually like what you would imagine 30’s/40’s radios voices would be), and those voices then take on the words of my thoughts, mostly incoherent, and I can actually direct what they say by thinking different things. Only happens when it’s really quiet and there’s some sort of white noise to fuel it. My ENT says it’s not common, but it’s a thing.
I often “hear” a super loud bang. Like an explosion.
Only while I’m about to fall asleep though.
There’s a theory that hallucinations especially in conditions that involve psychosis are actually signals in the brain being misinterpreted by other parts of the brain.
I’m told there’s actually a therapy based around learning to communicate with those hallucinations and understanding what your subconscious is trying to communicate (which part of the theory is that the subconscious is communicating with itself but the signals are being interpreted as something that’s real such as auditory signals or visual signals). Instead of being afraid of it or fighting it, the therapy encourages people to understand the message and work with it (not necessarily to agree with it but to make a decision once they understand the meaning behind it).
Say you have a microphone at point A, wired to a speaker at point B. Then someone connects a computer to that same wire and uses the connected speaker to play a .wav file.
The speaker would play the file just like it would play the microphone input, and if the sound was enough like something that the mic might realistically pick up, someone listening might not be able to tell the difference.
The microphone is like our ears and the hallucination is like the .wav file. It’s not affecting the microphone directly, it’s hijacking the process that normally interprets the microphones output.
Ive never heard things when falling asleep but I have while high after smoking weed. I was at a rock concert and inner voice was yelling my thoughts at me so loudly it was drowning out the music. I was actually worried those around me could hear my thoughts.
If you’ve partaken in psychedelics you know that a user doesn’t get full on hallucinations like in the movies. Like you’re not sitting there normal and then you see Bigfoot.
What you see are distortions and embellishments of what you’re already looking at. Auditory hallucination works the same way. You hear one thing and your brain morphs it into something unreal.
Can you hear what I have written here in your head? Have you a favorite song that you can recall? The sounds of the music, not just the name of the song. Your brain is creating these “sounds” for you. When you hallucinate, you perceive something that is not present.
The examples I gave are not hallucinations, because you “know” the cause is your own thought process. This means you have the ability to create “sounds” in your head, you do it all the time.
Any hallucination is created in you mind, but by another, subconscious, part of the brain. It can also alter the things you hear and see, so much so that you don’t recognize them as real, and so you have a feeling they are not real.
I have a tumor at the 7th cranial nerve and I hear maybe a hundred a day. I hear trumpets and running water. Conversations. Birds. The most reoccurring one is like a crowded bars door opening will you half block away, and many other sounds. Just crazy the things I hear.
I’m not sure sometimes when I wake up if I had just let out a single really loud snore or if it was just all a figment of my imagination.
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