Have you heard the sounds before? Nothing is more natural

Reading time: 2 minutes – spotted New York times

A few years ago, Swiss scientists discovered a way to make people hallucinate through an experiment. They sat the subjects in chairs and asked them to press a button that, after a split second, caused the penis to gently press against their back.

After a few laps, the volunteers had the impression that someone was behind them. Faced with the discrepancy between their actions (pressing the button) and their sensations (the stick touching their back), their minds imagined an explanation: a distinct presence in the room, Explains The New York Times.

In a new study Published in the Journal of PsychiatryResearchers from the same lab used this configuration to study another type of hallucination: hearing voices. In some sessions, there was no delay between pressure and touch, while in other sessions there was a half-second delay.

They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a sound when there was a delay between pressing the button and touching the stick compared to when there was no delay. According to them, these findings indicate that hallucinations have a neural origin in the way the brain processes contradictory signals coming from the environment.

A common phenomenon

During all trials of the experiment, volunteers listened to recordings of pink noise, a softer version of white noise. In each trial, volunteers were asked whether they heard anyone talking.

When people actually experienced the eerie feeling of a ghostly presence, they were more likely to say they heard a voice when there was no sound. “This suggests that the brain makes a connection between the hallucinatory presence and the sound.”“, explains Pavo Oribić, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and author of this new study.

Hearing voices is more common than you think, Orebek says. Scientists have found that many people without a psychiatric diagnosis — perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the general population — report hearing a disembodied voice at some point in their lives.