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.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.
True, the article is not about doing this for "fun". The article is about a controlled study of psychosis induced through extreme sensory deprivation.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.
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).
I'm curious, do people in this thread who report audio illusions/hallucinations consider themselves to have a high caffeine intake?
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.
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.
Whisper voices to the voices so they hear voices and go crazy and stop speaking to you
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.Wow, I thought I was going crazy. Thank god it's a common occurance
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]