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they were printed on a piece of paper floating in the air.
The threat to life may also come from within, and although we cannot know how
many attempts at suicide have been prevented by a voice, I suspect this is not
uncommon. My friend Liz, following the collapse of a love aair, found herself
heartbroken and despondent. About to swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and wash
them down with a tumbler of whiskey, she was startled to hear a voice say, “No. You
don’t want to do that,” and then “Remember that what you are feeling now you will not
be feeling later.” The voice seemed to come from the outside; it was a man’s voice,
though whose she did not know. She said, faintly, “Who said that?” There was no
answer, but a “granular” gure (as she put it) materialized in the chair opposite her—a
young man in eighteenth-century dress who glimmered for a few seconds and then
disappeared. A feeling of immense relief and joy came over her. Although Liz knew that
the voice must have come from the deepest part of herself, she speaks of it, playfully, as
her “guardian angel.”
V
arious explanations have been oered for why people hear voices, and dierent ones
may apply in dierent circumstances. It seems likely, for example, that the
predominantly hostile or persecuting voices of psychosis have a very different basis from
the hearing of one’s own name called in an empty house; and that this again is dierent
in origin from the voices which come in emergencies or desperate situations.
Auditory hallucinations may be associated with abnormal activation of the primary
auditory cortex; this is a subject which needs much more investigation not only in those
with psychosis but in the population at large—the vast majority of studies so far have
examined only auditory hallucinations in psychiatric patients.
Some researchers have proposed that auditory hallucinations result from a failure to
recognize internally generated speech as one’s own (or perhaps it stems from a crossactivation
with the auditory areas so that what most of us experience as our own
thoughts becomes “voiced”).
Perhaps there is some sort of physiological barrier or inhibition that normally
prevents most of us from “hearing” such inner voices as external. Perhaps that barrier is
somehow breached or undeveloped in those who do hear constant voices. Perhaps,
however, one should invert the question—and ask why most of us do not hear voices.
Julian Jaynes, in his inuential 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind, speculated that, not so long ago, all humans heard voices—
generated internally, from the right hemisphere of the brain, but perceived (by the left
hemisphere) as if external, and taken as direct communications from the gods. Sometime
around 1000 B.C., Jaynes proposed, with the rise of modern consciousness, the voices
became internalized and recognized as our own. 5
Others have proposed that auditory hallucinations may come from an abnormal
attention to the subvocal stream which accompanies verbal thinking. It is clear that
“hearing voices” and “auditory hallucinations” are terms that cover a variety of different