An echo of your former self

The journal Neurology has a brief case study reporting an intriguing form of auditory hallucination – hearing someone speaking in the voice of the last person you spoke to.

The phenomenon is called palinacousis and it usually takes the form of hallucinating an echo or repetition of the voice you’re listening to and it’s particularly associated with problems with the temporal lobes.

This case is a little different, however.

A 70-year-old right-handed white man was brought by his wife to the emergency room due to odd behavior for 2 days… According to the patient, he could not explain why people talking to him sounded strange, speaking in different voices which he heard before. For example, he would talk to a man and would hear him as talking with the voice of the woman he previously talked to. He thought it was funny and he could not concentrate on what the other person was saying because he would be laughing…

On occasion, he complained of hearing a very low-pitched intonation in people’s voices, including his own. At other times, he would hear a cyclical pattern of sounds that transitioned from noisy to silent. His most disturbing auditory symptoms persisted for several days and presented in 2 distinct forms. At first, he described hearing his deceased mother’s voice speaking to him through other people’s speech. Later on, he mentioned that after talking to one person, he would hear a second person speaking to him in the first person’s voice. He would also sometimes hear his voice as if it was the voice of the person he just spoke to. During physical therapy, the patient reported that therapist voices would suddenly change to those of people he had heard on television, which provoked uncontrollable fits of laughter.

In this case, the gentleman didn’t have damage to his temporal lobes, but a bleed that affected his right parietal lobe, which may have led to the atypical form of this hallucination.

In a recent paper, Sam Wilkinson and I noted that palinacousis is one example of an auditory hallucination that typically isn’t experienced as if you’re being communicated to by an external, illusory agent – which are perhaps the least common as most people hear hallucinated voices that appear as if they have some social characteristics.

However, it seems as if there’s even a social version of palinacousis where the echo is of someone’s voice form transposed on to the current speaker.
 

Link to PubMed entry for case study.