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Comment by maho | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, I was struggling to find the weak, electronic signal of an ion in a single-particle ion trap. I was certain the ion was still in the trap, but I probably had the trapping voltage wrong and the ion was not in resonance with the narrow-band (300 Hz) detector. I was trying to think where to borrow a broad-band FFT detector this late at night to look for the ion, when I realized I could just mix down the signal to the auditory range and use headphones to let my ears do the "FFT". I would easily get a few kHz of bandwidth this way!

But after only a few minutes of listening to the white noise of the (likely empty) trap, I started to hear voices, among which was the voice of the deceased PostDoc who had designed the experiment. I took the headphones off and never used that method again.

I'm afraid it would be quite easy to drive oneself mad this way.

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You might like the book Snow Crash. Spoilers: One of the plot points is that looking at certain visual pattern (in the form of tv static/snow) can permanently destroy someone's mind. The later parts of the book explore auditory signals.

This premise is somewhat believable since there are already people affected by epilepsy and can't tolerate flashing lights. And even regular folks are susceptible to optical illusions with (short-term)lasting effects such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect, https://gfycat.com/CoordinatedSleepyAnole, etc.

I wonder if they are really some combination of sensory input that can like you say "drive oneself mad" after exposure.

Side note: Optical illusions also affect artificial neural networks where they misclassify noise with high confidence as real objects: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/

I love Snow Crash. And whenever someone recommends it for that bit I want to also recommend the short story "Blit" by David Langford, from 1988: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

That. Is. Bloody. Frightening.

Sounds like noise can cause "hash collision" and pick up whatever there is in the brain map

As a child, I always had an irrational fear of channels on the TV with no signal - you'd get a blast of white noise accompanied with a grainy white noise image feed. Due to the internal amp configurations of the TV, the noise would always be much louder than normal channels, so it was always a shock when you landed on a dodgy channel. Then you would start to see faces and hear voices.

The film Paranormal Activity didn't sit so well with me...

Then try the movie "White Noise"

Oops I meant White Noise. That film really creeped me out!

Are you sure that ion wasn't in fact a sophon?

(spoiler alert for Three Body Problem)

In the book, a sophon was a proton that was unfolded from 11 dimensions to 2, had a supercomputer etched on it, and then got refolded back. Its primary job was messing with particle physicists and making them go crazy.

As long as you didn't cross the streams while getting it into the trap, you should be fine.

It is quite crazy. I have experienced this before and once I was on LSD. That was not a nice experience, I heard screaming babies. Easy enough to stop (put on music!) but really creepy. I thought I was going mad for a minute or two.

LSD and cannabis make it really easy to hear things out of ambient or static noises. It's pretty bizarre. But if you're aware of it as it's happening, you can actually control it to an extent and even make yourself hear whatever you want.

Yes, I've also experienced auditory hallucinations with LSD. Also synesthesia. And subsequently, with marijuana as well.

Although the voices are most likely not real, like recognizing objects in clouds, how do you know there really wasn't something there? (Puts pinky next to mouth) ;)

OPs troubleshooting technique was solid; any time you mix high gain with something non-linear with radio transmitters nearby, you can assume weird audio range waveforms on the O-scope are just the local sports-talk AM radio broadcast station showing up in what boils down to an overgrown crystal radio.

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