kahuta

Could this be a very important thing; if you type in the words "people talking" and "auditory hallucinations" in google, you will find that many voice hearers believe that other people/neighbours etc are talking about/persecuting them (and this often leads to violence) - before they find out that they are hearing voices. We know that voices can be heard both inside and outside of the head; could it be that the truth is more nuanced, and that the voices can also be heard to emanate from people's lips, passing cars, from MULTIPLE locations outside of the head (in external space).

I have been reading some material about delusions of reference in schizophrenia, i.e., the idea that some people have that the t.v. or the radio is talking about them and would like to propose that just as people hear auditory hallucinations internally and externally, for some reason, they may hear auditory hallucinations coming from a t.v or a radio. I suspect that certain areas of the brain that register the spatial location from where a sound emanates is activated when people hear voices from a radio or a t.v. I wonder whether people who think that other people are talking about them also hear voices emanating from the spatial location of the other person/persons.

I would like to quote a passage from one of the articles of Ralph Hoffman (Acta Psychiatr Scand, 2006) "Seeing Voices": fused visual/auditory verbal hallucinations reported by three persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorder" - "A male patient reported AVHs consisting of male and female voices occuring at a rate of 7-10 times per hour. He also reported visualizing lip and mouth movements superimposed on otherwise veridical perceptions of faces of actual persons that were fused with (i.e., matched the verbal content of and occurred in synchrony with) simultaneous AVHs. These fused visual/auditory hallucinations occurred most frequently when the patient was in the presence of his family or other familiar persons, and tended to reinforce the patient's conviction that others in his immediate environment were the source of the 'voices' he heard."

There is an article from Scientific American that shows how barn owls locate sounds in space (Listening with two ears, Scientific american, 2006) There also seems to be some research on the internet on how the human brain locates the spatial location from where sounds emanate. I wonder whether schizophrenia researchers would be able to use scientific techniques to see which regions of the brain are activated when people think that they are hearing voices from the radio or the t.v.