Researchers can now induce individuals to perceive illusory voices.
Prevalence of Hallucinations
In general, between 5 and 10 percent of healthy individuals experience hallucinations, according to a recent series of Norwegian psychiatric surveys.
Exploring the Touch-Hearing Connection
Using an autonomous system resembling a finger, a group of Swiss scientists has examined the connection between the senses of touch and hearing in an effort to determine why individuals “hear things” or perceive a physical presence in a room, which is a prevalent form of hallucination.
A robotic ‘finger’ would follow the Healthy Volunteers and lightly touch the test subjects on the back in response to a button press that would initiate the movement of a laboratory apparatus.
“Start your investing journey with a gift! Claim your free Webull shares.”
In general, the intervals between button presses and pokes were brief to nonexistent. However, in instances where such intervals did occur, participants would experience a sixth sense activation, perceiving tactile proximity and audible communication.
In two experiments involving forty-eight participants, a greater number of unanticipated pokes prodded their backs, leading individuals to be more likely to report “vocal false alarms.”
There are numerous types of hallucinations, including seeing faces and animals, hearing objects, and even sensing the presence of a bug on one’s limb.
This “sense” that something might be occurring is more prevalent than one might expect.
We have five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and scent. However, we also possess a sixth sense: proprioception, or the awareness of your body. Furthermore, our capacity for hallucinations is a component of this sixth sense.
“These experiences do, in fact, occur along a continuum,” Dr. Orepic explained to The New York Times. “Also, we all hallucinate; for example, fatigue increases the likelihood of hallucinations; however, certain individuals are more susceptible than others to this phenomenon.”
The research findings, published in Psychological Medicine, indicated that individuals were more prone to attesting to the presence of a “weird” sensation associated with an object nearby when no voice was present.
The participants were also instructed to report instances in which they detected human voices amidst “pink noise” played in the room, which was analogous to the sound of wind or heartbeats.
Some of these fragmented recordings did contain the artist’s voice or the voice of an unknown individual blended in with the ambient noise.
Additionally, the researchers observed that participants who were exposed to background noise while listening to a voice recording exhibited a heightened propensity for experiencing auditory hallucinations during subsequent recordings throughout the experiment.
Certain participants who engaged the robotic ‘finger’ by pressing the button in front of them reported hearing voices even in the absence of any latency or the absence of any vocal input.
According to the researchers, this may have occurred if the participants were “unconsciously” operating the autonomous system and believed they heard their own voice due to a state of inertia.
Results and Implications
The study indicates that hallucinations might be more prevalent among healthy individuals, including those without a medical history of neurological disorders or hearing impairment when one experiences difficulty perceiving their own body awareness or proprioception.
Using a memory compartment in the brain as evidence, the researchers hypothesize that participants’ sixth senses were affected later in the environment when they retained information from earlier portions of the trial.
This investigation, according to the researchers, could “shed new light” on contact and voice hallucinations.
Perhaps the next time you run through Central Park, you might be experiencing something that a great number of people around the world are attempting to discern: the possibility that someone is following you, or the realization that the sounds emanating from above are not the only ones you can hear.
