I’ve written a piece for the new PLOS Neuro Community about how the social aspects of hallucinated voices tend to be ignored and how we might go about making it more central in psychology and neuroscience.
It came about because the PLOS Neuro Community have asked authors of popular papers to write a more gentle introduction to the topic, so the piece is based on a PLOS Biology paper I wrote last year.
I’ve met a lot of people who hear hallucinated voices and I have always been struck by the number of people who feel accompanied by them, as if they were distinct and distinguishable personalities. Some experience their hallucinated entourage as hecklers or domineering bullies, some as curious and opaque narrators, others as helpful guardians, but most of the time, the voice hearer feels they share a relationship with a series of internal vocal individuals.
The piece discusses psychology and neuroscience but in the post, I also mention some work I’ve been doing with philosopher of mind Sam Wilkinson. As luck would have it, Sam just published a post about what we’re working on, on the excellent Imperfect Cognitions blog.
It looks at hallucinated voices and the representation of agency and agents. If you’re not used to these terms they can be slightly opaque but they refer to how the mind and brain represents autonomous individuals – be they human, animal, presumed or imaginary – and how that might relate to the experience of having hallucinated voices.
Link to A Social Visit with Hallucinated Voices.
Link to The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations.
Mind Hacks 