Sometimes I think someone has called my name and they never said anything.
Sometimes I’ve even heard what seemed like someone shout right next to my face, but that mostly happens when I’m close to falling asleep!
I hope that makes a bit of sense!
In: Other
To add to the other comments – your brain is pretty optimised for extracting patterns out of all sorts of nerve stimulation and matching them with things it has encountered before, but it can be too sensitive, pick out patterns and declare a match without really checking its work.
As a little example, we recently had some patio doors replaced and changed from sliding doors to hinged doors – I was washing up in the next room when I heard them being opened, and my brain ‘identified’ the sound as the familiar sliding noise because that’s what it was expecting, so I ‘heard’ the sliding track noise in my head even though the actual noise was different. The washing up noise was probably just enough to muffle the sound so my brain went ‘meh, close enough’.
My brain just took a shortcut in the identification process – much the same as when your brain picked up some little sound that was a little bit like your name, and jumped straight for ‘you just heard someone calling your name!’ which is something you are wired to respond to.
It’s like when there’s silence our brain tries to fill it up with noise. We very rarely encounter absolute silence and when we do, it gets weird for us. When confronted with absolute or even near silence, human brains and ears react in some pretty weird ways. Ways that can result in a wide range of bizarre sonic experiences.
First off… most of the things you perceive in life are a bit artificial. For example: You think you can see colors in the periphery besides your focus. Actually that’s biologically impossible since the receptors that perceive your periphery are mostly only seeing black and white, more accurate the brightness. So your brain fills in the gaps by experience or memory. I think that is what is happening to you. You are in a situation and hear or see something. Now you expected a specific reaction because you are subconsciously used to it. For example: Maybe you know the situation where you have to ask someone several times what they said, although they clearly stated it and it should be easy to understand. But maybe your thoughts were in a completely different direction and the words spoken didn’t meet your expectation. Now your brain needs time to adjust. If it’s not that, you are having hallucinations but it think that’s unlikely from what you said. Additionally there are interesting experiments where test subjects are conditioned to a specific sound while doing a specific task. Now the sound is gone while they do the task and can still sometimes hear the sound. Of course it differs depending on how susceptible a person is to these kinda manipulations.
Your brain makes stuff up (or remixes stuff from your past memories) all the time, but usually we can easily distinquish between the “inner voice” of our imagination (or mental images) and reality. In some cases, for a number of different reasons, it fails and we experience hallucinations. Also, sometimes our brain thinks that it detected something in the outside noise and makes you think that you actually heard somethink.
Hallucinations are not great but what you are experiencing when you are falling asleep is pretty normal and it’s called hypnagogic hallucinations. They aren’t a sign of any illness, it’s just your brain slowly preparing to fall asleep, shutting down some systems and activating some others, so that’s kinda like fragments of an incoming dream get mixed with reality.
For the falling asleep part you will probably benefit on reading up on [exploding head syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome)
Latest Answers