When I stopped hearing the voices in my head
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Theory: The brain has two hemispheres: One does the talking and one does the listening. Sometimes we react because the "self" is the last to know or just reacts not realizing it is a self evaluation below our awareness. (Dog goes to bite your hand and you react.) We then try to assign order to that chaos with a reason such as "god[s]", or "spirit[s] warned us or made us do so.
Snippet: "..."... Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes, include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia and the general sense of need for external authority in decision-making...."
http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/...
a Institute of Neurology, London, UK
b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy
c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna, Italy
Reprint requests to: Dr Andrea Eugenio Cavanna Amedeo Avogadro University Corso Mazzini, 18 - 28100 Novara - Italy E-mail: acavanna@ion.ucl.ac.uk
Received: October 2006 Accepted for publication: January 2007
That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that puzzle, and at the end of the day i settled for a mix of "currently unknown exactly how that is done" (sort of like consciousness itself, i guess) to "wow, reality sure does have some extra layers of "fun" i hadn't really been informed about.
If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns".
Now, i was lucky enough to have a very supportive and patient family that viewed it as something that could be managed outside of the realm of antipsychotic therapy. I'm not saying that handling it with prescribed drugs is necessarily a bad idea, if it works for you then i hope it continues to do so.
Sorry for the rant, but i was just reminded of how weird all of that stuff was to go through. Its been a while since i thought about it.
It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake.
I guess i'll never know.
Sidenote: I can sometimes sort of do it when I'm awake, but only when I'm really, really tired.
I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce it.
Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.)
Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself).
So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods.
So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can
Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.
I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.
Translated to IT terms, I always thought that I had more computing power available while my conscious brain was partially disabled...or perhaps that my conscious brain had a limited information scope (ie. bandwidth) which made it filter out too much extraneous information, making me feel as if I (as a conscious entity) could only experience and be aware of less information at a time than in semi-conscious states.
If you feel like sharing, I'd love to hear more about your experience with this.
But that initial "boom" when you go from "i am me and i am here in my head" to "oh hey, i have an invisible counterplayer in here that is capable of manifesting itself as realistically behaving, voice-pitch-perfect impressions of all my friends and family, who proceed to harass/cajole/support me in a theatrical landscape choreographed with split-second focus on whatever it is my "i" express." Granted, this is also dream, but dream is too fragmented, and too prone to halt|flush|restart compared to four/six hour long internal conversations (with the occasional external auditory hallucination when fitting).
And then you get to live that for a few years, and its a mixture of exhilarating and scary as fuck. And you're forever left with a brain that you sometimes think of with the premonition "well, if you could do that, what other tricks do you have up yor sleeve".
You may like this article that talks about people who hear voices but who don't have a psychotic illness.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voi...
They too prefer to manage with meds.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23824214 http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-t...
Surely they're not as visceral or reflexive as the author's voices. But I have always found value in empathizing with fantasized mentors, which has given me confidence in my opinions.
I hope I never lose track that I am initiating those conversations...I'm old enough to be well past the standard age for developing schizophrenia...but if I did lose track, I at least have my atheism to fall back upon and my memory of having read through Jaynes a couple of times.
If you hold a mobile phone to your ear, nobody will give you a second look.
(what should really worry you is if you hear 'ok.')
If there's a real person around I just talk to the real person, and on non-shy days this could easily be a stranger. It could make me annoying, but I also like to listen if it's about the same topic.
To me this all seems perfectly normal. My reasoning is that by activating more brain areas (i.e. Broca & Wernicke) and preferably also the pre-motor and motor cortices by moving (so walk while talking to yourself), the brain can make more connections to the content you're thinking about. That's just my hunch though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9142246
Feel free to ask me about it.
> 124 lbs ..., alcohol units 4, cigarettes 10, calories 1876, minutes spent having imaginary conversations with Daniel 24 (excellent), minutes spent imagining rerun of conversations with mother in which I come out on top 94.
That's when I realized it's more or less a universal thing.
Yeah, I get that every so often. Every couple months, maybe. No idea what it might be called.
I almost always have a song running in the background, never the same, but I wake up to a song and I go to sleep with a song.
Sometimes "one or more songs" manifests not as one song at a time, but instead like a cacophony of players all stuck on repeat-1.
I find that whole article manipulative and disingenuous in the extreme. A full page free advertisement for the psycho-pharma industry.
Just like that dental article a few days ago, doesn't the current psychiatric medicine seem like using a backhoe on a flower pot? Sure, you move the soil, but you trash the porch.
With my ex-fiancee, a psychiatrist had her on prozac and abilify. She had a complete breakdown in her senior year of university classes. They put her on a cocktail of stuff and weren't honest in their dealings (parents and doctor).
She had quite a few voices and things in her head. And the drugs helped that, to a point. It was when she started getting tics that I investigated more, and saw the 3-5 pages of "adverse conditions". Tics (tardive dyskinesia) was a permanent adverse condition, and could be gained at any time after starting just Abilify.
When you're trading one set of nasty stuff for another set of nasty stuff, and then eventually have to quit, is it worth it? Especially if you end up getting the initial set of nasty plus whatever the drugs have induced as well?
Hopefully, better research will target neurons directly or properly calculate for hormonal deficiencies.
Now admittedly, I'm for proper disclosure and informed consent. There's times in which a drug/surgery can cause more damage than what you're trying to fix. And in the case of my ex, it was that she was developing adverse conditions, and she wasn't told. I've taken antidepressants along with other medicines. Nothing wrong with taking drugs to help fix problems. If you're thinking about quitting, talk to your doctor. Some of those drugs are dangerous to quit cold turkey.
You're right that many of them at the moment suck. They have long lists of side effects, some of the side effects are severe (reducing quality of life, sometimes reducing length of life).
At least in the UK there's some push towards patients becoming much more involved in their care. There's a bit of of focus on the informed part of informed consent. But we could do better here.
For some of the severe mental illnesses it's a tricky balance - do we medicate people or let them live with their illness? Mostly this should be up to the patient. If someone has the capacity to decide then they're allowed to "make the wrong choice".
And while the side effects suck they can be better than the illness, which can lead people to die by suicide or live miserable lives.
But if someone just hears voices, and is okay with them, doctors should not be pushing that person towards medication but towards crisis planning and advanced directives.
The author didn't share a diagnosis, nor did he or she share the specific medication(s) that helped. Given that, how can you conclude that the drugs "deadened neurons"?
I share your skepticism of modern psychiatric medicine, and yet I think you might be missing some understanding and/or empathy for the patient. He or she is describing schizophrenia and major depressive disorder [1], and while often found together, either one can be utterly debilitating. It would not surprise me if the patient had the same concerns as you and I, but was so desperate, so hopeless that they were willing to take the risk.
[1] not a doctor, therapist, counselor or anything close
[edited to fix footnote]
"antipsychotic medication, which seemed so important in the early phase of psychosis, appeared to worsen prospects for recovery over the long-term" in reference to these studies.
You mistake me for talking about the author. I was making commentary about the broad umbrella of psychiatric medicines.
Both I and my wife have taken those drugs, and the feeling in my body was that they deadened a part of ourselves. In my wife's words, "I still wanted to kill my self, but didnt have the will to do it." That's the deadening; feelings were 'grayer', tastes were bland, colors were muted.
> It would not surprise me if the patient had the same concerns as you and I, but was so desperate, so hopeless that they were willing to take the risk.
And I'm perfectly OK with someone with informed consent taking substances. And I consider making use of wikipedia and Erowid as part of that consent, as well as doctors in your stead. I'm also not OK with doctors covering up, glossing over, or blatantly lying about problems that can arise. And from what I've seen, the psychoactive drugs can cause all sorts of side effects, some short lived; others permanent.
My wife and I have had this discussion; Under what conditions would it be OK to forcefully administer psychiatric medicines? Our discussions seem to show no good way to handle this, as it goes from the men in lab coats prior to the 60s, to the abuse of patients ending in the 80s, to simple imprisonment now.
That's a significant interference with a person's human rights, so it should be done as a measure of last resort, after all other options have been tried, and with a bunch of checks and measures built in. The person should pose an immediate risk of significant harm to themselves or to other people, and the person should lack capacity to make the choice. The people making the choice should be senior, experienced, and well trained.
And after it's happened there should be some kind of case review to see if it can be avoided in future.
For example, if the person became distressed to the point they are rapidly tranquilised the case review would look at behaviours of other people that created the distress.
I know this entirely too well because my mother was violently murdered by someone off their meds and the doctors managed to decide that nobody was at risk in spite of her telling them she feared for her life.
So I'd be more inclined to say that doctors have good reason to make sure people stay on their meds and to change treatments to ones where compliance can be better enforced whenever necessary.
There was a recent reddit article in /r/news that talked about a Hawaiian prison that screaming, throwing feces, and other illness had taken over as the makeup of the prison. In general, we have collectively decided that there will be no/little support for the mentally ill, and that the jails and prisons will be the tool to stop them.
With the side effects as they are, how ethical is it to imprison them? They are ill, and we do not generally charge people if a legitimate illness causes a crime (no mens rea). And with the side effects, how ethical is it to force (by court) the drugs that 'cure' them?
"I" likes to think that it's running the show, but really it's at best a commentator. All too often, that "I" fucks up and sabotages. As HenryTheHorse notes, in Buddhism it's called the "monkey mind". It's a machine that evolved for survival and reproduction.
Anyway, it's useful to distinguish "It" -- the "monkey mind" survival machine -- from ones identity. And that's a practice to engage in. Understanding is the booby prize ;)
People hearing voices perceive those heard voices in the same way they'd perceive an actual person talking to them.
People experience different voices, but it's reasonably common to experience the voice as male and standing behind you. But the voice could be whispering (like white noise), or robotic, and it could appear to come from people actually in the room or from objects.
When people seek help about such matters, they often find themselves working with therapists who have this or that conceptual framework. And so patients learn to frame their experience accordingly. Explanations are comforting.
So anyway, I'm dubious about the distinction. I think that it's an artifact of social norms and therapeutic bullshit.
What i find missing in most conceptual frameworks is a greater response to the raw constructive capacity of the human brain. Most inquiries into mental voice states (non-consciously controlled ones) deal not directly with the capacity of the brain for such activity, and its implications for phenomenology of being, but with it as an outlier to normal human function. Granted, the reason for this being that its what pays the bills, and i assume a lot of people don't want the hassle and can't really afford to spend time trying to figure it out. Thats perfectly reasonable.
As for the great phenomenology of mind/being/brain discussion, its good fun. I'm pretty much consigned to the fact that artifacts are what we have, and what we will forever work with. In my opinion the idea that the natural state is superior in matters of mind is as much an artifact of a particular social conception as all others. Often the conscious sabotages, often the unconscious does. Believing either to be naturally superior without any form of proper data sets relating to weighted choicemaking over an extensive period of time for multiple individuals is still just a statement of faith, regardless of how you assemble it. (And good luck finding the objective criteria on which judgements as to superiority of choices are concerned.)
Basically, its a tug of war between conscious and unconscious, and i think we should be glad that it is thus and not unnecessarily elevate one over the other. But hey, thats just like, my opinion man.
The distinction between conscious and unconscious is too simplistic, I think. There's a continuum in multiple dimensions. But I do agree that it's all useful in one way or another. It was simplistic of me to dismiss consciousness.
We're all familiar with the process of learning motor skills. Much conscious attention is required at first. We screw up and get feedback. We think about it. We listen to coaching. We keep practicing. And eventually, it becomes automatic.
I believe that the same process applies in all areas of being. It's a little hard to get, because the learning goes out of consciousness. You know what you've learned only through measuring performance.