[thedoc (OP)]

What’s it like to hear voices? Is it hallucination or normal human
experience?
Read a transcript of the interview by clicking here
or [chapter podcast=1000944 track=14.12.29/Naked_Scientists_Show_14.12.29_1003084.mp3] Listen to it now[/chapter] or [download as MP3]

[evan_au]

Recent work shows that some cases of schizophrenia are due to an auto-immune attack on the brain. In some cases this is triggered after birth of a child.

Perhaps a new avenue for therapy? (30 minute podcast...)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/schizophrenia/5654952

[smart]

I think schizophrenia is a childhood-like disease with both negative and positive symptoms. I agree that schizophrenia should be recognized as a disorder of consciousness. Recent research in quantum biology identified a link between microtubules activity and consciousness dysregulation (schizophrenia):

Inspired by the striking evidence for quantum effects in biology,23,24) it has been argued that microtubules, which play critical roles in all eukaryotic cells, possess structural and functional characteristics that are consistent with quantum coherent excitations in the aromatic groups of their tryptophan residues66); the consequence of these observations have been put forth with a proposition that “quantum biology in neuronal processes underlie the emergence of consciousness and these processes are sub-served by microtubules”.66) From information processing perspectives, microtubules in brain has been proposed to serve as a communication channel that facilitates information transfer and storage; these sub-neuronal processes occurring at the level of microtubules might underlie the generation of consciousness.67)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4423156/

I think consciousness disorders are caused by the immaturity of the brain to process and integrate informations. No medications exist yet to make consciousness coherent, however some psychedelic drugs (cannabis, lsd) are believed useful to introspect and examine the states of consciousness.  Hallucinations are uncommon for cannabis users, thus making cannabis a safe tool to study conscious activity. 

[puppypower]

Voices in the head demonstrate that it is possible for the brain to internally trigger the same circuitry that is being used by the sensory systems. This is why some people can't tell the difference between the pink elephant walking down the street and the cars they see on the same street. This internal brain capacity allows us to become conscious of internally generated content, via what appears to be external sensory input.

This is no big deal, because this occurs all the time in dreams. For example, visual dream content can be generated even with the eyes closed. We can also hear things in dreams. Nobody treats dreaming with meds even though the same schema is being used. 

I am not sure why this is considered pathological, since it is a natural capacity of the brain, that could be harnessed by consciousness as an interface to unconscious processing.

One reason may have to do with exploitation via projection. Projection is where unconscious content shines onto reality like a movie superimposing onto reality. The net result is many people will see sensory input from reality, superposed with internally generated output using sensory circuitry. The nice dog may appear scary due to an internally generated feeling being projected and superimposing onto reality. The composite is scary, not the dog.

Since audio and visual hallucinations are taboo, even though the brain can do this, most people are trained to become unconscious of projection. They are not trained to see and differentiate two separate things, since one thing is considered taboo and should never be mentioned in public, less they put you in a padded room. I suppose this makes it easier to manipulate people in a herd type way. If you see the projection, this is taboo and something is wrong with you. Get in the chute and be sheared.   

For example, marketing often uses sex appeal via the sexy babes and guys who sell the cars i commercials. The goal, of repetition, is to trigger internal desire, which then will superimpose onto the visual external reality of the new car. We then see a composite. This is an induced hallucination at the level of feelings, but it is not suppressed with drugs, even if the same schema is used. This makes use of feeling type senses. For some reason only visual and audio output is taboo. If we think the rotten food tastes good, this hallucination is OK. 

Back in the day, before science, helpful and evil spirits, as well as dead ancestors and spirit guides would help people out. These were more than likely internally generated sensory output, that would superimpose and appear as an apparition into reality. In those days, this would not always be repressed, but rather would be witnessed as distinct in external reality. It was a tough time for people so their brain potential was high.

The church would say to repress this, but not so much due to it being a hallucination. Rather it was considered from the devil and not from a helpful spirit. This may have begun the traction of repression; all is bad. Modern repression of this natural brain capacity may now be due to atheism, in the light of the traditional spiritual connection. All religion is taboo therefore if you see or hear any spirit, then you will be shocked or drugged.

I look at brain function as being based on energy and entropy priorities. The output needed to drive such affects appears to be based on the brain attempting to lower internal potential. Certain pathologies and conditions will increase brain potential and make this affect more pronounced.

The output can be useful, since it reflects an internal path toward removing the excess brain potential. The internal output reflect the energy lowering but it may not always be enough to change the energy balance, permanently, since the conscious mind tends to reinforce worn paths of behavior; add potential anew. This output can never be useful since it is from the devil and looks too much like religion, which is taboo.

Theoretically, one can use this internal generated output to map out the brain's operating system. The trick would be to add selective potential to different areas of the operating system. The operating system is not the same as the physical brain, anymore than the sound board defines how Windows 10 works. The internal lowering of potential, will give off output, that then allows us to infer coding at that point in the operating system. This is the future of brain research. It opens the possibility of making more use of the CPU and subliminal areas of the brain; human evolution.

[RD]

I think schizophrenia is a childhood-like disease with both negative and positive symptoms

The phrase "positive symptoms" in relation to schizophrenia does not mean beneficial symptoms ...

positive symptoms – represent a change in behaviour or thoughts, such as hallucinations or delusions

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Schizophrenia/Pages/Symptoms.aspx

... cannabis a safe tool to study conscious activity ...

Cannabis may not be a "safe tool" for people with schizophrenia ...

Cannabis use appears to exacerbate psychotic symptoms and increase risk of psychotic relapse.

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/189/2/137


 

[smart]

Cannabis may not be a "safe tool" for people with schizophrenia ...

I disagree... Antipsychotics includes more serious side-effects (NMS, Parkinson, death) than cannabis to examine/introspect consciousness!  However, I agree with you that positive symptoms of schizophrenia may not be beneficial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic_malignant_syndrome

[RD]

Cannabis may not be a "safe tool" for people with schizophrenia ...

I disagree... Antipsychotics includes more serious side-effects ...

You're conflating two separate issues :-
#1. Is cannabis "safe" for people with schizophrenia ?,
#2. Do the benefits of anti-psychotic medication outweigh their side-effects ?.

[ Re:#2 , Some people with schizophrenia are not in a position to judge : as they don't perceive they have a mental illness ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia#Psychiatry ].

[smart]

#1. Is cannabis "safe" for people with schizophrenia ?,

Yes. No death ever occured from cannabis use.

#2. Do the benefits of anti-psychotic medication outweigh their side-effects ?.

[ Re:#2 , Some people with schizophrenia are not in a position to judge : as they don't perceive they have a mental illness ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia#Psychiatry ].

Antipsychotic medications can trigger psychosis and hallucinations... Cannabis is a natural antipsychotic. Furthermore, cannabidiol (CBD) may be used to treat schizophrenia with less side-effects (extrapyramidal symptoms, hallucinations) than antipsychotic drugs.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/30/marijuana-compound-treats-schizophrenia-with-few-side-effects-clinical-trial/

Hearing voices inside your head doesn't mean you're mentally ill: The perception of self-awareness is variable for humans. Attempting to "treat" consciousness disorders require a careful examination of the degree of self-awareness is perceived. In my opinion, overmedication is largely responsible for the positive/negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

[the5thforce]

ultimately all mental conditions are a spectrum

-when someone talks to you you'll hear their voice in your head after it vibrates your ear drums
-intentionally replaying someones voice in your mind is hearing their voice in your head
-our mind usually has a default voice we experience when thinking introspectively
-we have the power to change our default introspective voice to almost any voice imagineable
-unintentionally or impulsively hearing "someone elses" voice in your head still originate from the memories in your head whether or not you accept responsibility, usually what the voices are saying is what causes the pathology not necessarily the voice itself

while lying in bed just before going to sleep if you review what was said that day while drifting further into your imagination and into a sleep state you might hear what seems like radio static voices popping in and out of your head until they eventually merge with an entire dream-like storyline which if you can control allows for extremely powerful lucid dreaming

i would guess people with severe schizophrenia likely have a sleeping disorder, arent exercising enough, arent eating healthy, arent getting enough positive social interaction, etcetera

the mind is much simpler than people like to believe, 'mental illness' is almost always a combination of fear, depression, and poor physical health. all animals need fear to survive, depression is an immune response to failure, physical fitness maximizes physical ability which maximizes mental ability

[RD]

No death ever occured from cannabis use.

Next you'll be telling us no-one has ever died from smoking tobacco.

"... serious cardiovascular events including myocardial infarction, stroke, sudden cardiac death, and cardiomyopathy have been reported to be temporally associated with cannabis use..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_%28drug%29#Cardiovascular

Death can also occur as a consequence of being intoxicated (by any substance) via misadventure, inhaling vomit, suicide & murder.

[RD]

i would guess people with severe schizophrenia likely have a sleeping disorder ...

Sleep deprivation can cause psychosis , but that doesn't mean all psychosis is caused by lack of sleep.

Evidently schizophrenia can be inheritable ...
 [ Invalid Attachment ] http://www.schizophrenia.com/szgencounsel.htm

[cheryl j]

There are forms of auditory hallucinations that are not related to schizophrenia or psychosis. They are not accompanied by disordered thinking or paranoia, and may be a result of an abnormality in the  frontal lobe, temporal lobe, language processing system, ear or auditory system, according to wikipedia.

An interesting type of auditory hallucination is "musical ear" in which people hear music that is not in the external environment and it is thought to be related to the onset of deafness.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2249916/Musical-ear-syndrome-The-grandmother-hears-Happy-Birthday-24-7-rare-brain-syndrome.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21625772

[puppypower]

We have five senses; sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Say you wake up one morning and smell gingerbread cookies baking in the oven, but there are none. Will this olfactory hallucination have the same social stigma as a visual hallucination? Or say you are at a wine tasting and you the only one who tastes watermelon and elderberries. Will the men in white coats be called in. Or, will it be treated as being due to personal subjectivity and poor judgement?

Why is internally generated sight and sound treated differently? Or why isn't all internally generated sensory parallel not the treated the same?

One difference is education and social conditioning and marketing, tend to use sight and sound more than the other senses. If the marketeer convinces people his cheese ball is the best tasting cheese ball in the world, and people hallucinate this level of optimized taste, nobody gets upset or scared in quite the same way. Why is there a taboo difference?

Say there is a riot and some people see this as a justified demonstration, while other see this as a criminal act? Which of the two groups is having a visual hallucination? Why is this not treated as a group hallucination and one group requested to use drugs? Is it because the hallucination was programed through visual and audio input and therefore a product of manipulation? Should group hallucination be treated differently from individually generated? Shouldn't there be one standard or is the dual standard used for a reason?

Say people are entering a country illegally and therefore there are visually breaking laws that are already on record. One can verify this by looking at the law and the video and comparing the two. Say the leader does not see this action as breaking the law, so he dies not enforce the law, what type of hallucination is he having; audio or visual?

Is the dual standard in affect because this is connected to a group manipulation schema, designed to make a group of people hallucinate the same thing? Does the taboo will only appear if someone in the programmed group says he can't see what he is told to see? Is lack of hallucination in a group, the assumed pathology?

Maybe we need to define a new type of hallucination to address such cases. I will call this a masking/screening hallucination. This is where we hallucinate a mask (like in photoshop), which covers over part or all of sensory reality. This can blank out reality and/or can act as a screen for an internal projection due to programing secondary hallucination.

Is the dead spot in the sensory field a negative hallucination, if we don't add the projection? For example, people are walking down the sidewalk and there is a mugging. Instead of feeling fight or flight, which is instinctive, they don't see anything. If asked about it later they can't remember details since it was masked out.

Say after a lengthy round of social programming, the same person walks the same sidewalk and now have the ability to add the programmed hallucination onto the blank screen. He now sees Robin Hood taking from the rich. Is this a double hallucination? Say one person in the programmed group adds their own personal visual hallucination. Instead of not seeing anything, or instead of now seeing a  Robin Hood, they see a thug and try to break up the act. Is this a triple hallucination, and will only the third hallucination be taboo with the other two OK?

[cheryl j]

I feel like many of your examples blur differences in perception, interpretations of information, with hallucination. There may well be overlap here, but generally hallucination refers to internally generated sensations that are experienced as externally generated ones. Not that the brain doesn't screen, amplify, minimize or ignore stimuli, and some hallucinations may be altered perception of sensations generated externally, but I would still argue that with hallucination, the brain is adding some additional information of some kind, perhaps from stored memories.

As to whether visual or auditory hallucinations are more disturbing or "taboo" than other kinds - I'm not  sure that is always true. Last summer I listened to an interesting story on CBC about vestibular hallucinations. These can go beyond simple vertigo or dizziness. A lady described feeling like she was going crazy - the world suddenly felt like a strange, and unpredictable place with rubber floors and weaving walls, the terrifying sensation of unexpectedly free falling through infinite space, or tossed around like a sock in a clothes drier that wont stop turning. She said she didn't even connect it to an inner ear problem at first, because it wasn't like other kinds of dizziness she had experienced before - she said it was weird and subtle at first - a feeling of being "unmoored" from reality, and she was diagnosed with other kinds of mental problems - anxiety, depression - before a neurologist discovered the real cause.   

Vestibular hallucinations are even associated with out of body experiences. 

[smart]

I often converse with myself without apparent reasons. Sometimes smoking pot will amplify the dialogue between me and my consciousness. I like to introspect how I feel by asking and responding to questions I perceive... I do think this is not a case of pure hallucination, since I alone is responsible for this behavior. Cannabis use bends my imagination and creativity in a deeper reflexion mode. I think this substance have a powerful capacity for introspection of self-awareness.

Consciousness is a complex interaction between myself and my ego. I don't understand my ego in full but I like to examine how myself is reacting to my own imagination, ideas, and theories. I listen to my inner voice as a mentor and guide through my life and existence.

I don't believe schizophrenia is a well known mental disease... Peoples cannot understand or hear the inner voice of someone else without listening to their own consciousness. If schizophrenia is a consciousness disorder, then I guess I'm often a schizophreniac, being constantly interacting with my inner voice.  Could antipsychotics reduce or inhibit this behavior? Nope. My inner voice is resistant to changes and is getting itself more intelligent as I grow older.

Do all humans have a sense of their own inner voice? I don't think so. Some peoples may refuse to listen or hear their own consciousness. I think however this skill (self-awareness?) can be trained through meditation and happiness...

Anyways, thanks for this great thread. I appreciate how you all have informative opinions on the topic of consciousness; the mental capacity to examine your own behavior.  []

[guest39538]

 Voices in the head doe's not exist, it is in their own imagination and a fake illness invented by the individual.  The individuals are confused and their own thinking as become another voice in their head, what they are listening to is their own thinking and their own voice. 
Fakes and charlatans...attention seekers.


I have had ''voices'' in my head when I am in deep thought, however I realised it was me talking to me.


Thoughts are neurons firing, they don't actually hear anything but the thought, their own thought, they are all lier's and fakes and attention seekers,

[Colin2B]

Voices in the head doe's not exist, it is in their own imagination and a fake illness invented by the individual.  .....they are all lier's and fakes and attention seekers,

It is not possible to know someone else's thoughts, or what is going on in their heads. It is unreasonable and extremely rude to suggest they are liars.
It also goes against the spirit of the rules you signed up to when you joined this forum.

[guest39538]

It is not possible to know someone else's thoughts, or what is going on in their heads. It is unreasonable and extremely rude to suggest they are liars.
It also goes against the spirit of the rules you signed up to when you joined this forum.

It is not impossible to know somebodies thoughts , our thinking process is exactly the same thinking process as anybody else,  neuron based. It is not against the rules to have an opinion, it is neither rude to call them charlatans or liars, it is impossible to have somebodies else's voice in your head, your thinking and thoughts are not somebody else's they are your own and accountable for your actions and a voice in the head is not an excuse to avoid punishment for such things as crimes, that is a make believe trick invented by narcissists to escape punishment.
I listened to the mp3 , things like the voices told me to jump off the bridge, what garbage and attention seeking gibberish.
You control you, nobody controls you, I do not believe voices in the head exist the same as i do not believe fairies exist.......scientifically and medically impossible in my opinion.
People will always have free will, nobody can take this away from us, especially not your own voice in your head, look at Bronson, he will have free will until he dies.

I have free will, I will never be owned by anybody or controlled, I do not accept forced disciplines, you have no control over me, you can enforce your rules and ban me, so what? you still will never own me .....and your science will still be wrong.

I am not a little puppy who always follows the rules I am an individual, all forums want you and more or less demand you to accept their version of science, a new theory is pointless, a new idea is pointless, you really do preach.

Anyway a ban is again imminent, so I wish you good day and a probable good bye, I am sick of pretending I am an actual nice  person, because I am not, I hate the world and all that is in it, including science that has practically destroyed Earth with all its inventions of emr sources and energy to bust the entropy of the earth.

[smart]

I believe consciousness is singular. I don't think it is impossible for my consciousness to reproduce mentally the voices of random peoples. When dreaming, its often possible to listen to many voices while no one is here physically. Consciousness create reality and perception. No consciousness is perhaps how a criminal or mentally ill person is thinking: It is the ego which controls the mind over free will. Human nature is essentially conscious. It is scientifically and physically possible that we can hear many voices in our mind through existence.