Auditory+Hallucination+and+processing

Auditory hallucination (of sane people)

Garrett Sneen

WIP

Auditory hallucination generally refers to the psychological disorder phenomenon by which one hears distinct voices that don’t exist. There are other phenomenons that occur in the perfectly sane that have to do with the way in which we perceive sound. Often times there are ways our mind will interpret sound by hearing something that “isn’t there.” This can happen because of “suggestions” by competing stimuli, or an attempt to familiarize and make sense of arbitrary sounds.

The fact is that there is a difference between sound as an “event,” and sound perception as a mental process based on imagination and memory. The sound processing that takes place (and manufactures sound phantoms) is undoubtedly influenced by one’s culture and the concepts and labels it conjures up. In everyday listening, we don’t pay attention to the individual sounds— instead, we tend to think of the sound in terms of events, the context of the sound, and its source. Music on the other hand, is something that is listened to for its sound quality. This is most likely a result of evolution. For the sake of survival, one must be able to identify the meaning of a sound before appreciating its quality. This “mapping” or labeling is what takes place in the mind after the sound is heard, and this is what allows one to immediately think “loud sirens = danger,” instead of curiously dwelling on the type of siren it is and the quality of its tone.

However, when there is no context or meaning to be found, we can map our own fabricated “sound.” These are some examples.

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Diana Deutsch has one track in particular that simply repeats two noises that are heard as distinct words (that even change the longer you listen to it) despite the language you speak.

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[|http://www.kyushu-id.ac.jp/~ynhome/ENG/Demo/illusions.html]