Eine Studie über die Art und Weise, wie Menschen Sprache verarbeiten, findet den ersten greifbaren Beweis dafür, dass verbale Halluzinationen – oder das Hören von Stimmen – bei Menschen mit Schizophrenie auf einer Störung der Fähigkeit des Gehirns, seine eigene innere Stimme zu erkennen, zurückzuführen sein könnten
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/10/brainwave-eeg-study-sheds-light-hearing-voices-schizophrenia?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social
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Hi r/science! Sharing this study published by our researcher Professor Thomas Whitford, testing the hypothesis that verbal hallucinations are a misperception of inner speech as external voices for people living with schizophrenia.
The study groups were made up of:
* 55 participants living with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders who had experienced auditory verbal hallucinations in the past week
* 44 participants living with schizophrenia, but either had no history of auditory verbal hallucinations or hadn’t experienced them recently
* 43 healthy people with no history of schizophrenia as a control.
Each participant was connected to an EEG to measure brainwaves as they listened to audio over headphones. They were asked to imagine saying either ‘bah’ or ‘bih’ in their minds at the exact moment they heard recordings of one of those two sounds played through headphones. The participants had no way of knowing whether the sound they heard in the headphones would match the sound they made in their imagination.
In the healthy participants, when the sound that played in the headphones matched the syllable they imagined saying in their minds, the EEG showed reduced activity in the auditory cortex – the part of the brain that processes sound and speech. This suggests the brain was predicting the sound and dampening its response – similar to what happens when we speak out loud.
In the group of participants who had recently experienced hallucinations, the results were the reverse. Instead of the expected suppression of brain activity when the imagined speech matched the sound heard, the EEG showed an enhanced response.
Here’s a link to the full study: [Corollary Discharge Dysfunction to Inner Speech and its Relationship to Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders](https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/advance-article/doi/10.1093/schbul/sbaf167/8293244)
So basically it’s both the storyteller and the audience at the same time.
This is the basis of Julian Jaynes’s argument that the two brains have only been united for a comparatively short time:
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality)
explains why voices are often so critical, knowing things only the person experiencing them knows.
if my inner critic was a voice I couldn’t recognize as my own…truly awful.
Hey, is this a good place to ask
I remember reading a theory, that early humans lacked the bridge to combine parts of the brain, so its possible they heard their inner thoughts as GODS or SPIRITS. Similar to what this is talking about.
Is there actual science behind that, or just an interesting idea?
I read the same story out loud to my son so many times that I suddenly found I was able to read it out loud to him while thinking about other things at the same time.
I was reading the story and listening to it at the same time.
I was wondering which is the real me? The one speaking or the one thinking and listening?
I theorized that this was the two halves of my brain working independantly but in my experience multitasking has always been switching my focus between tasks, often very quickly, but never actually thinking about different things simultaneously.
I was freaked out and haven’t read that book since.
I think a lot of people are confident about knowing who they are, their soul, their brain, their control of themselves. Most of them are confidently incorrect in my opinion.
I think human consciousness is a sort of illusion our brain creates to help us process reality that works just good enough to get by and the more carefully you study it the more tenuous our assumptions get.
If I unexpectedly throw a ball at you your arm will move and catch it and then your brain will trick you into thinking you decided to catch it when there was no time to make that decision. The arm started moving before any decision to move it had been made.
Sounds about right. I grew up with a guy who got a schizophrenia diagnosis, and the thought struck me that maybe he somehow disowned his inner monologue.
I saw a man on a bus once who was muttering to himself, then immediately yapping back as if someone else spoke to him. Really unsettling to observe.
Can’t understand how such a disconnect may happen. Seems to me like it should be possible to catch what’s going on and break the cycle, but clearly it’s easier said than done.