The Voice Within: Researcher Tackles Auditory Verbal Hallucination

Sharon Moore December 09, 2013

Whilst “hearing voices” are behaviours often seen in people with schizophrenia, most of the time it is a common phenomenon that even healthy individuals experience. And despite the fact that they are fundamentally a social experience, current theories remain rooted in an individualistic account and have largely avoided engagement with social cognition. In a paper published in the journal PloS Biology, Vaughan Bell, a researcher from King’s College London, urged psychologists and neurobiologists to create a new understanding of these phenomena.

Previous studies have reported that between 30 and 69 per cent of people who hear voices experience them as having specific personal identities. The biggest study to date reported that 31 per cent of 199 voice hearers with psychiatric diagnosis did not experience anonymous voices, 32 per cent experienced a mix of known and unknown voices, and only 37 per cent experienced purely anonymous voices

According to Bell, current neurocognitive theories tend to ignore how those who hear voices first acquire what he describes as "internalised social actors." For instance, a young child cut from a school basketball team which they worked hard to make, may be temporality devastated, but hardly traumatised. If they renew their efforts to make the team the next year and practice each day in their backyard, they might imagine the coach who cut them watching their every shot with a critical eye. While this hallucinated guidance would be entirely benign, if the person they imagine is instead an abusive parent or classmate, the internal model might eventually take on a more sinister nature.

The inner voices inside the brain

“Over the last decade, psychological-level research has focussed on the link between social cognition and auditory verbal hallucinations and has amassed a significant amount of evidence as a result. However, researchers working in cognitive neuroscience, who are specifically looking to make links with neurobiology, have only occasionally engaged with studies that have investigated the social neurocognition of hearing voices. Despite some provocative results, they have not yet used paradigms that would disentangle the extent to which the “social brain” is part of the hallucinatory experience. This is clearly an area where more targeted research needs to be completed. Similarly, more effort needs to be put into developing theories that include the socially relevant evidence, as this has been largely ignored in both cognitive and neurocognitive accounts.”

“As one of our most enigmatic experiences, “hearing voices” is at once both individual and social. There is a clear need to understand it in terms of the individual mind and brain, and a clear opportunity for it to shed light on the social world that lives within us.” Bell concludes.

Source of this article:

A Community of One: Social Cognition and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations