![]() Our work found that people with serious psychotic disorder in different cultures have different voice-hearing experiences. In an interview, Luhrmann said that American clinicians “sometimes treat the voices heard by people with psychosis as if they are the uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease which should be ignored. The new research suggests that the voice-hearing experiences are influenced by one’s particular social and cultural environment – and this may have consequences for treatment. The experience of hearing voices is complex and varies from person to person, according to Luhrmann. In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology and first author of the article in the British Journal of Psychiatry. People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research. ![]() To take part click here.Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology, studies how culture affects the experiences of people who experience auditory hallucinations, specifically in India, Ghana and the United States. The Hearing the Voice project is conducting a survey in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Book Festival to explore the ways readers imagine, hear or even interact with the voices of characters in stories. Information about voice-hearing in general is available at our project blog. If you have had an experience of voice-hearing without need for psychiatric care, please get in touch with us at the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. Another 10 years of research with non-clinical voice-hearers will allow us to understand how and why that’s possible. Voice-hearing might be a distressing experience for many, but it doesn’t have to be. Identifying some of the cognitive differences between clinical and non-clinical voice-hearing could also provide clues about the kind of skills you might need to manage voices and make them less disruptive – the protective factors that allow people to hear a voice but carry on with their lives. Knowing more about how voice-hearing develops, especially after being experienced for the first time, is vital to provide better care for those who seek help. Voice-hearers with psychosis are also more likely to use an atypical network of brain areas for language, whereas non-clinical voice-hearers seem to show more typical patterns of language functioning. In contrast, a recent study by researchers in Norway suggested that voice-hearers without psychosis don’t appear to have that problem. For example, voice-hearers with psychosis sometimes have difficulty with managing their attention when listening to external sounds. There is also evidence of subtle cognitive differences between clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers. It may provide support and guidance, or have a spiritual aspect. For many non-clinical voice-hearers, the voice they experience is very important to them. The voices heard in non-clinical groups are also much more likely to be positive and helpful than those experienced by people with psychosis, but it’s not clear why. There is some evidence that non-clinical voice-hearing tends to start early (around 12 years of age), while voices associated with psychosis usually start in late adolescence and early adulthood. But it’s just as important to look for the differences between clinical and non-clinical voice-hearing, because it’s the differences that might hold the key to providing better support for those who are unwell or in distress. Knowing that voice-hearing in clinical and non-clinical groups is similar allows us to investigate hallucinations in isolation from other aspects of psychosis, such as having delusional or disorganised thoughts. We know from first-person reports that the voices themselves can be quite similar, in terms of how loud they are, where they are coming from, and whether they speak in words or sentences. These results suggest that, on a neural level, the same sort of thing is going on in clinical and non-clinical voice-hearing. Subsequent studies with the same non-clinical voice-hearers have also highlighted differences in brain structure and functional connectivity (the synchronisation between different brain areas) compared with people who don’t hear voices. When this group was compared with voice-hearers who did have psychosis, many of the same brain regions were active for both groups while they were experiencing auditory hallucinations, including the inferior frontal gyrus (involved in speech production) and the superior temporal gyrus (linked to speech perception). Twenty-one of the participants were also given an MRI scan.
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