US Edition50-Year-Old Mystery Solved? Scientists Uncover Why People with Schizophrenia “Hear Voices”
Researchers at UNSW Sydney found disrupted brain prediction may cause 55 schizophrenia patients with hallucinations to misattribute inner speech as external voices.
- Recently, a UNSW-led study published in Schizophrenia Bulletin found auditory verbal hallucinations may arise when inner speech is misattributed as external sound, testing 55 people with recent AVH, 44 without, and 43 controls.
- Brain prediction mechanisms normally suppress self-generated sounds, but this suppression fails in people currently experiencing auditory verbal hallucinations, causing the auditory cortex to misinterpret inner speech as external sound.
- Using EEG, the team measured responses to imagined syllables 'bah' or 'bih' and found participants with recent AVH showed increased auditory responses when imagined and external sounds matched, reversing healthy control suppression.
- Clinical researchers view the result as a step toward biomarkers as the findings may help doctors identify who is at risk of psychosis before it occurs, enabling early intervention for psychosis and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
- After decades of theorising, researchers have directly tested the 50-year hypothesis about misattributed inner speech, and Thomas Whitford and his research team at UNSW plan future studies to test predictive value for transition to psychosis.
12 Articles
12 Articles
50-Year-Old Mystery Solved? Scientists Uncover Why People with Schizophrenia “Hear Voices”
New research suggests that hearing voices in schizophrenia may arise from the brain’s failure to recognize its own inner speech. A team of psychologists at UNSW Sydney has uncovered the most compelling evidence so far that hearing voices in schizophrenia may result from the brain’s inability to recognize its own internal speech. Published in the [...]
Whose voices do people hear in their heads?
Recent research has supported a long-standing theory, and it may also help treat schizophrenia.
Inner speech glitch explains why people with schizophrenia hear voices
For decades, scientists have suspected that the voices heard by people with schizophrenia might be their own inner speech gone awry. Now, researchers have found brainwave evidence showing exactly how this self-monitoring glitch occurs.Continue ReadingCategory: Brain Health, Body and MindTags: mental health, psychiatry, Schizophrenia, Electroencephalography (EEG), Signs and symptoms, University of New South Wales, Chinese University of Hong Kong
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