Scientists can now cause people to hear phantom voices and ‘feel a presence in the room’
Scientists can now make people hear phantom voices.
Overall, 5 to 10 percent of healthy people hallucinate, according to a recent series of psychiatric studies conducted in Norway.
But to understand why, a team of scientists in Switzerland have now tested the link between the senses of touch and hearing, using a finger-like robotic system to find out what makes people ‘hear things’ or sense a presence in the room. form of hallucination.
Healthy Volunteers pressed a button to stimulate the movement of a device in the laboratory: a robotic finger behind them that gave the test subjects a small tap on the back.
Typically, there were short to no delays between each button press and the poke – but when there was a delay, participants activated that sixth sense, as if someone was talking close to them.
From two tests involving 48 subjects, more people were likely to report ‘vocal false alarms’ when their backs were poked with more unexpected pokes.
Even healthy people can hallucinate, whether they feel like something is touching them or hear the nonexistent voices of strangers, as if they were nearby.
Hallucinations can come in many forms, such as hearing things, seeing faces, animals or even the feeling of an insect on your arm. This ‘feeling’ that something is wrong is more common than you might think.
Taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch make up our five senses. But we also have a sixth sense: proprioception: the awareness of your body. And part of this sixth sense is our ability to hallucinate.
“There’s actually a continuum of these experiences,” Dr. Orepic to the New York Times. “So we all hallucinate – at certain times, like when you’re tired, for example, you’re more likely to hallucinate – and some people are more sensitive to that.”
According to the research, published in Psychological medicineparticipants were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was no voice, if they were already starting to get a “weird” feeling from something close to them.
In addition to poking individuals, participants were asked to report when they heard human voices in “pink noise” played in the room – similar to the depth of heartbeats or gusts of wind.
Some of these fragmented recordings contain their own voice, a stranger’s voice mixed with the ambient noise.
The researchers also found that wWhen a voice recording with background noise was played to a participant, the individual was more likely to hallucinate voices during other recordings later in the experiment.
Some participants who pressed the button in front of them to activate the robot finger also claimed to have heard voices when there was no delay and when there were no voices.
The researchers say this could be due to an inert feeling as the participants ‘unconsciously’ controlled the robotic system and thought they had heard their own voice.
Even in these healthy individuals who have no history of neurological disorders or hearing loss, the study suggests that hallucinations are more likely to occur when a person has difficulty understanding their body’s consciousness or proprioception.
With a pocket in the brain used to store memory, the researchers suggest that when participants retained the previous parts of the trial, it affected their sixth sense later in the environment.
This study could “shed new light” on voice and tactile hallucinations, the researchers say.
Maybe the next time you run through Central Park you will experience the presence that someone is standing behind you or that the birds singing in the treetops are not the only melodies you hear, something that many other people around the world experience.