“What he hears is normal, it’s his fear”

'Hearing voices' can occur in asylum seekers. The voices may arise from traumas they suffered in the country they fled. They may also arise from fears caused by the asylum system in the country they seek refuge in. What the voices say can make sense, given what the person is going through. Safety and community …

Taking back the brain: Trialling neurofeedback for voice-hearing

Hearing voices (also referred to as 'auditory verbal hallucinations') need not be associated with problems. However, for a number of people, they are. Problems are particularly likely to arise if the voices are frequent, say negative things, and if the person has no control over them. Different people want differ ways to cope with their …

50-to-life: Why the phenomenology of ‘hearing voices’ matters

The experience of “hearing voices” has been reported for millennia, including by people such as Socrates, Joan of Arc, and the Beach Boy’s Brian Wilson. It can be experienced in the context of a diagnosed psychiatric disorder (e.g., schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, anorexia), a neurological disorder, or by people without any diagnosis who may …

Silence of the Ancients

I’d found a Narnian door for adults... It led from a ordered, public gallery in the British Museum to a sprawling and private unseen back-world of crates, dust and straw. Here, history peeped out one corner at a time and raging mummies rampaged freely. Well, maybe not the mummies. As I crossed the threshold, I felt …

Hallucinations and a brain wrinkle?

A recent study I was involved in, led by my colleagues at Cambridge University, found a relation between the length of a specific groove in the frontal lobe of the brain (formally termed the paracingulate sulcus, although dubbed a 'brain wrinkle' by the BBC) and the likelihood that a person diagnosed with schizophrenia will have experienced hallucinations. You can discover more about …

How do antipsychotic drugs have their effect?

Today I’d like to draw your attention to a new paper just published by Moritz and colleagues (link here), which examines how antipsychotic drugs have their effect. What did it do? This on-line study involved 95 people, who had experience of taking antipsychotics, completing a questionnaire called the Effect of Antipsychotic Medication on Emotion and …