Hearing Voices: Experiences of Hallucinations Caused by Sensory Deprivation

[Aero51]

Analogous to visual hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/hallucinations/This has happened to me a few times

Does anyone else have these experiences?

 

[chemisttree]

I've got kids. I hear voices all the time.

 

[Aero51]

I loled when I read that.

 

[chemisttree]

...but no beautiful musick.

 

[berkeman]

For me it happens when it is pretty quiet, but there is a very soft source of white noise from something. Like it I'm at work on a weekend in my office, and the HVAC is making very quiet noises. Sounds like undefined music or maybe a radio talk show (even though there are no radios around).

 

[arildno]

From what I've read, it is not that uncommon with either auditory or visual hallucinations. Personally, I have only experienced it when extremely fatigued.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't think it's a good idea to seek this experience because you run the risk of having it happen to you involuntarily at a later time when it is not welcome.

Musical hallucinations are sometimes experienced by elderly, partially deaf people, and it is a great irritation to them. Oliver Sacks explains that the auditory cortex of the brain experiences a sort of starvation for stimulation when deafness sets in, and it makes up for this by repeating the firing patterns experienced in the past while hearing music in the background. These people can't control what they hear or when or the volume, and in many cases it drives them nuts.

 

[leroyjenkens]

Oliver Sacks explains that the auditory cortex of the brain experiences a sort of starvation for stimulation when deafness sets in, and it makes up for this by repeating the firing patterns experienced in the past while hearing music in the background.

I've noticed when I'm in complete silence, like when I was a kid hiding in a closet, I start to hear a high pitched sound.

 

[Evo]

I don't think it's a good idea to seek this experience because you run the risk of having it happen to you involuntarily at a later time when it is not welcome.

True, the article is not about doing this for "fun". The article is about a controlled study of psychosis induced through extreme sensory deprivation.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19829208

 

[AnTiFreeze3]

For me it happens when it is pretty quiet, but there is a very soft source of white noise from something. Like it I'm at work on a weekend in my office, and the HVAC is making very quiet noises. Sounds like undefined music or maybe a radio talk show (even though there are no radios around).

This is almost exactly how I would describe it, too.

Although I've only experienced this, oh, probably fewer than 10 times. The most irritating part was that the songs would always be vaguely familiar, so I would become temporarily obsessed with trying to figure out what song I was hearing.

EDIT:

I also had a set of speakers on an old desktop that, when turned off, would produce what I interpreted as human voices, but, even after putting my ears right next to the speakers, I was unable to distinguish any words. The tone seemed very professional.

Although, once I unplugged the speakers, the noises stopped.

 

[256bits]

Interesting.
A television on a non channel with the hshhchchsht white noise has tiny voices sometimes.
Could this be the explaintion about some particular people needing anti-alien and anti-government tin foil hats to hearing a burning bush talk to the explaantion of "so and so told me to do it"?

 

[bobze]

Just a quick note on terminology, if you are misinterpreting a sensory input (like white noise) as something its not, it is an illusion. So an illusion is based on a real external stimuli, it just isn't correctly interpreted.

A hallucination is a sensory experience not based on a real external stimuli.

 

[Pythagorean]

I'm curious, do people in this thread who report audio illusions/hallucinations consider themselves to have a high caffeine intake?

 

[Aero51]

Heres a good link
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_hallucination

 

[AnTiFreeze3]

I'm curious, do people in this thread who report audio illusions/hallucinations consider themselves to have a high caffeine intake?

Nope. Most of the occurrences were when I was much younger, anyway, before I even knew how great coffee can be.

 

[StevieTNZ]

I had audio hallucinations, as well as the feeling the cabinet was falling on top of my bed, when I had tonsillitis. It was the night after the day of a headache not going away where I could not sleep at all.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Humans have perception templates. Did you ever see a face or an animal in a cloud? Everyone has. The same thing is true for a broader range of sensory inputs, including sounds.

Our sensory processing is analogous to what radio astronomers do - we employ built in filters which try to make sense of otherwise random-appearing input. Minus FFT's.

So, at night when local background noises are not drowned out by traffic and hustle and bustle from outside, our processors pick up low level noises. Some are actually things we can identify, others may (or may not) get fudged by sensory processing into "speech". Or animal noises.

This kind of background noise has been used to great spooky effect in some scary movies.

Anyway, in: Douglas Hofstader's 'Metamagical Themas' and 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' (1980) -- are the places I first encountered the concept of hard-wired perception templates. Both are probably secondary sources, but I never followed up.

 

[lisab]

Humans have perception templates. Did you ever see a face or an animal in a cloud? Everyone has. The same thing is true for a broader range of sensory inputs, including sounds.

Our sensory processing is analogous to what radio astronomers do - we employ built in filters which try to make sense of otherwise random-appearing input. Minus FFT's.

So, at night when local background noises are not drowned out by traffic and hustle and bustle from outside, our processors pick up low level noises. Some are actually things we can identify, others may (or may not) get fudged by sensory processing into "speech". Or animal noises.

This kind of background noise has been used to great spooky effect in some scary movies.

Anyway, in: Douglas Hofstader's 'Metamagical Themas' and 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' (1980) -- are the places I first encountered the concept of hard-wired perception templates. Both are probably secondary sources, but I never followed up.

Sensory deprivation has long been observed to trigger hallucinations.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Sensory deprivation does that. I thought the thread was on about being alone in a quiet time and hearing things.
Things that are not actually there.

Drugs do that as well - meaning psychoactive prescription drugs. My wife died from Alzheimers; during the last months was prescribed valproic acid - a drug from 100 years ago. It was first synthesized in 1882. It helped her, but induced auditory hallucinations.

 

[Viracocha]

Whisper voices to the voices so they hear voices and go crazy and stop speaking to you

 

[Flatland]

I've noticed when I'm in complete silence, like when I was a kid hiding in a closet, I start to hear a high pitched sound.

Wouldn't that be tinnitus?

 

[Aero51]

Whisper voices to the voices so they hear voices and go crazy and stop speaking to you

Funny thing, I was half dozing off when I started to hear this amazing jazz music. I was enjoying it quite a bit when all of a sudden I said "where is this coming from" and I shot right up scared to death.

 

[Sauce1800]

Wow, I thought I was going crazy. Thank god it's a common occurrence

 

[Evo]

Wow, I thought I was going crazy. Thank god it's a common occurrence

I think you misunderstand, hearing things that aren't there (auditory hallucinations) is not common and can be a sign of something wrong with your brain. If you are hearing things that are not there, you should see a doctor.

A paracusia, or auditory hallucination,[1] is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus. A common form involves hearing one or more talking voices. This may be associated with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or mania, and holds special significance in diagnosing these conditions.[2] However, individuals may hear voices without suffering from diagnosable mental illness.[3]

There are three main categories into which the condition can often fall: a person hearing a voice speak one's thoughts, a person hearing one or more voices arguing, or a person hearing a voice narrating his/her own actions.[4] These three categories do not account for all types of auditory hallucinations.

Other types of auditory hallucination include exploding head syndrome and musical ear syndrome. In the latter, people will hear music playing in their mind, usually songs they are familiar with. Reports have also mentioned that it is also possible to get musical hallucinations from listening to music for long periods of time.[5][dead link] This can be caused by: lesions on the brain stem (often resulting from a stroke); also, tumors, encephalitis, or abscesses.[6] Other reasons include hearing loss and epileptic activity.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_hallucination

The OP is about medical sensory deprivation though.

 

[zoobyshoe]

If anyone's interested, Oliver Sacks wrote a mind-boggling overview of everything remotely connected to music and brain pathology: Musicophilia. It's guaranteed the average reader will never have heard of most of the strange musical/neurological phenomena described.