Auditory hallucination

“ The hallucinatory perception may involve two or more senses, e.g., the subject may seem to see a human being, to hear his voice and to feel the touch of his hand. This is rarely the case in spontaneous hallucination, but in hypnotic hallucination the subject is apt to develop the object suggested to him, as present to one of his senses, and to perceive it also through other senses.
Among visual hallucinations the human figure, and among auditory hallucinations human voices, are the objects most commonly perceived. ”

“ Another patient of mine suffers from auditory hallucinations. He hears people abusing him and calling him names. The hallucinations occur when he is awake, but they are frequent when he is on the point of falling asleep, or when he wakes up. He thinks, in fact he hears that people whisper about him. The voices are observed to increase in frequency and intensity with the presence of external noises, such as noises made in the hall, or sounds made by cars passing by. The patient was observed having subconscious or unconscious movements of lips, tongue and even of the jaws. ”

“ The comparative frequency of auditory hallucinations, and especially the ease with which auditory illusions can be built up on a basis of real sound, render coincidences of the kind, even the best attested, of less service to support, however valuable as illustrating, the theory of telepathy. Visual hallucinations, however, present us with a much rarer type of impression, and one in which explanation by illusion is comparatively seldom possible. ”

“ Auditory hallucinations, especially voices, seem to fall into two distinct classes— (1) those which are heard as coming from without, and are more or less definitely localized in outer space, (2) those which seem to be within the head or, in some cases, within the chest, and to have less definite auditory quality. It seems probable that the latter are hallucinations involving principally kinaesthetic sensations, sensations of movement of the organs of speech. ”

“ Disease of the ear may obviously act in the same way, but, even apart from actual disease, various nervous disturbances favour the production of auditory hallucinations during sleep, and, in marked cases, even awake.
We may dream of listening to music in the absence of all external sounds having any musical character. In such cases, no doubt, the actual conditions [78] within the auditory mechanism are suggesting music to the brain, but the resulting music seems usually to be less definite, less rememberable, than when it forms around the nucleus of an external series of sounds. ”

“ When he hears the voices the subconscious movements increase so that they may be perceived at a distance. Even the nurse could not help perceiving the subconscious whispering made by the patient. When the patient looks through a printed or written page the subconscious whispering increases. The same is observed when the patient is very much interested in something or absorbed in deep thought. During such times he complains that he hears voices. With his mouth wide open and holding his tongue stationary, the unconscious whispering ceases and along with it the auditory hallucinations disappear. ”

“ Auditory Hallucinations.—Hallucinations of hearing are more common than those of vision. Many people have had the experience of waking up thinking that someone was calling them. A great many people are sure that they have, at some time or other, heard a voice when no one was near enough to them to have said anything. They have even recognized the voice. Some people, when thinking deeply about a person, have the voice of that person occur to them so clearly that they cannot quite make out whether they have actually heard it or whether it has only been very vividly reproduced in their memory. ”

“ It is probable that in normal life they are most frequently due to peripheral disturbance. And it seems reasonable to suppose that where the hallucination remains in this initial stage of a very incompletely interpreted visual or auditory impression, whether in normal or abnormal life, its real physiological source is the periphery. ”

“ The census of hallucinations conducted by the Society for Psychical Research showed that about 10% of all sane persons can remember having experienced at least one hallucination while they believed themselves to be fully awake and in normal health. These sporadic hallucinations of waking healthy persons are far more frequently visual than auditory, and they usually take the form of some familiar person in ordinary attire. ”

“ Hallucination may be roughly defined as false sense impression. For example, the patient sees an object which has no real existence, or hears an imaginary voice. Hallucinations are termed visual, auditory, tactile, etc. ”

“ When they happen during the day it is sometimes at the moment of passing from very bright light to a darker hall that the occurrence takes place and evidently there is some physical occasion for the appearances in the eye itself. Unusual noises of various kinds are responsible for the auditory hallucinations. ”

“ A similar explanation applies to the influence of fixed gazing upon a crystal, or the placing of a shell over the ear, in inducing visual and auditory hallucinations. The “recurrent sensations” experienced after prolonged occupation with some one kind of sensory object may be regarded as due to an abnormal excitability of the cortical system concerned, resulting from its unduly prolonged exercise. ”

“ The spirits having no vocal organs, can only produce noise. In a spiritual hurly-burly, some of the mortals present hear nothing (as we shall note in some modern examples) , but may they not be prevented from hearing by the spirits? Or again, the sounds may be hallucinatory and only some mortals may have the power of hearing them. If there are visual, there may also be auditory hallucinations. {133} On the whole Thyræus thinks that the sounds may be real on some occasions, when all present hear them, hallucinatory on others. ”

“ Were there auditory hallucinations? If so, they were only episodic and took no part in either the construction or the fixation of the man’s delusional system. Thus, a voice once said to him, “All is not lost. You will be ——.” May 25, 1917, he entered the neurological center at Bourges.
As to the interpretation of this case, it seems that the patient’s mother had crises of depression which at one time caused her to be interned in the Charité. ”

“ I may remark, by-the-way, that auditory hallucinations of this kind are apt to occur in prisoners who are subjected to long periods of solitary confinement in their cells: they have no mental resources to fall back upon, and their brooding thoughts, not being distracted by the conversation of others, nor having their usual outlet in their own conversation, become audible by them as actual voices. ”

“ Thus, a morbid irritation of the cortical visual area or sphere will give rise to abundant hallucinations of sight; irritation of the auditory sphere to hallucinations of hearing, as sounds and voices, etc. It must be borne in mind that, however pathological hallucinations may be, they arise from the operation of a fundamental physiological law. In health we constantly refer our sensations or transfer them into the external world, thus creating for ourselves the non-Ego. ”

“ Hallucinations (which are all in one’s eye or sensory centre, or cerebral central terminus) , cannot draw curtains, or open doors, or pick up books, or tuck in bed-clothes, or cause thumps—not real thumps, hallucinatory thumps are different. Consequently, if the stories are true, some apparitions are ghosts, real objective entities, filling space. The senses of a hallucinated person may be deceived as to touch, and as to feeling the breath of a phantasm (a likely story) , as well as in sight and hearing. But a visible ghost which produces changes in the visible world cannot be a hallucination. ”

“ In sensation we hear sounds that are caused by objective bodies; thus a bell agitates the air and we hear it, but we may have a disturbance of the physiological function of the ear, due it may be to the influence of a drug or perhaps to a disease of the organ. Now, such a subjective impression or functioning of an organ of sense we call a feeling impression, and when we consider it to be objective we hallucinate or have an hallucination. ”

“ Before proceeding, in the chapters which follow, to cite instances of hallucinations which purport to have been telepathically originated, it seems needful to glance briefly at sensory hallucination in general. To most persons, no doubt, the word connotes disease. Their ideas of hallucination are probably derived from vague reports of asylum experience and delirium tremens ”

“ Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these hallucinations is their remarkable range—a range as wide, perhaps, as that over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The post-hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to which spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined) , but all kinds of vaso-motor responses and organic sensations—cardiac, stomachic, and the like—which no artifice can affect in a waking person. ”

“ It is possible that persons with hallucinations of hearing, and [Pg 61] individuals afflicted with the mania that they are victims of persecution, may all belong to the auditory type; and that the predominance of a certain kind of imagination may predispose to a certain order of hallucinations, and perhaps of delirium. ”

“ An injured external organ conveys a false and distorted message to the brain and to the intelligence. A nascent malady of the ear may produce buzzings, and these may develop into hallucinatory voices. Here be hallucinations from without. But when a patient begins with a hallucination of the intellect, as that inquisitors are plotting to catch him, or witches to enchant him, and when he later comes to see inquisitors and witches, where there are none, we have, apparently, a hallucination from within. ”

“ Then I told her of Wilfrid’s melancholy perturbation, on which her face grew grave and her air thoughtful.
‘He did not tell you the nature of the warning?’ she inquired.
‘No. It evidently had reference to his baby. I wished to [89] ascertain whether it was a voice or a vision—though I really don’t know why; for an hallucination is an hallucination all the world over, and it signifies little whether it be a sheeted essence to affect the eye or a string of airy syllables to affright the ear.’
‘I am sorry, I am sorry,’ she exclaimed anxiously; ‘it is a bad symptom, I fear. ”

“ Looking to their mode of origin, it is obviously of the first importance, trite maxim as it may seem, to keep the body in good health; for not only will bodily disorder directly occasion hallucinations by disturbance of the sensory centres, but by its depressing influence on the entire nervous system it hinders sound, and predisposes to unsound, thought and feeling. Every one knows how hard a matter it is to perceive accurately, to feel calmly, and to think clearly, when the liver is out of order; there is then a good foundation for hallucination. ”

“ Sensory hallucinations—to take the most striking instance—though unusual are not extremely rare experiences; most educated persons are perfectly familiar with the fact of their occurrence and regard them (in most cases rightly) as purely subjective, the products of some transient cerebral disturbance, as little worthy of record as a headache or a bilious attack. Often, probably, the telepathic hallucination is indistinguishable from the mass of purely subjective experiences of the same kind ”

“ The picture is mental, in such a case; it is an imaginative creation; it is a hallucination,—although it was caused or created by another, distant mind. It was, it is true, a hallucination; but as it was induced by telepathy, we have for such apparitions the name of “telepathic hallucinations.” It is this theory of “telepathic hallucinations” which is invoked to explain many of these cases of death-coincidences, or apparitions of the dying. ”

“ It is not at all uncommon for a vivid hallucination of one or other of the senses, of hearing, of sight, of smell, of touch, of muscular sensibility, to precede immediately the unconsciousness of an epileptic fit. It may be a command or threat uttered in a distinct voice, or the figure of a person clearly seen, or a feeling of sinking into the ground or of rising into the air; and a common visual hallucination on such occasions is a flash, a halo, or a flood of bright or colored light, which makes a strong impression before the person falls unconscious. ”

“ When such a brain during sleep is unoccupied with the ordinary objects of sensation, feeble impulses, which usually remain unnoticed, may sometimes suffice to arrest the attention. We may thus explain the possibility of impressions derived from distant events passing into the consciousness of a dreamer, and arousing hallucinations of which the immediate cerebral mechanism is the same as that of the ordinary hypnagogic hallucination. ”

“ In so far as the error involves the ascription of the sensation to a force external to the sense-organ, this part of the mental process must, when there is no such force present, be viewed as hallucinatory. Thus, the feeling of something creeping over the skin is an hallucination in the sense that it implies the idea of an object external to the skin. Similarly, the projection of an ocular impression due to retinal disturbance into the external field of vision, may rightly be named an hallucination. ”