Hearing voices is not necessarily a sign of madness (Image: Alex Brunet/Transit/Picturetank)
For Socrates, it came as a warning when he was about to make a mistake. For Sigmund Freud, it was a loved one accompanying him when he travelled alone. Hearing voices has a long history.
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And as those distinguished gents perhaps attest, it isn鈥檛 always a sign of madness: our everyday thoughts often sound pretty voice-like. In 2011, and Simon McCarthy-Jones of Durham University, UK, found that 60 per cent of us experience 鈥渋nner speech鈥� with a back-and-forth conversational quality.
So where does inner speech end and hearing 鈥渙utside鈥� voices begin? One answer is that an inner voice 鈥渟ort of feels like you鈥�, says Fernyhough, so you feel more control over it 鈥� but given how involuntary many thought processes seem to be, that is rather unsatisfying. 鈥淭he question is at the heart of the puzzle of hearing voices, and why we haven鈥檛 got better at understanding it,鈥� says Fernyhough.
, he and his colleagues estimate that between 5 and 15 per cent of us hear outside voices, even if only fleetingly or occasionally. About 1 per cent of people with no diagnosis of mental illness hear more persistent, recurring voices. Around the same proportion of the population is diagnosed with schizophrenia, challenging the assumption that the two are related.
So far, there seems to be little difference between the brains of those who haven鈥檛 been diagnosed with mental illness, but do hear voices, and those who don鈥檛 hear voices. It鈥檚 probably best to ask yourself one question before getting worked up about the voices in your head, says Fernyhough: are they bothering you?
Voices aren鈥檛 the only expression of our inner thoughts 鈥� our minds tell us stories, too. This 鈥渃onfabulation鈥� is a symptom of some memory disorders, whereby people have false recollections. But the rest of us do it too. Experiments show, for instance, that when people are forced to make a random decision they later invent a narrative to explain it.
One theory is that this helps us make sense of a world that bombards us with information, and gives conscious rationale to decisions we make for unconscious reasons. , an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, thinks our lies are more self-serving: by lying to ourselves, we lie better to others too.
This may explain the phenomenon known as positivity bias, whereby people overestimate their virtues. 鈥淲e put ourselves in the top half of positive distributions,鈥� says Trivers. 鈥淓ighty per cent of US high school students believe they are in the top half for leadership ability.鈥� With these boosting voices, you probably shouldn鈥檛 be too worried about what you hear 鈥� just don鈥檛 believe everything they tell you, either.
Read more: 鈥�Is your mind normal? 7 reasons it probably is鈥�
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎re the voices in my head normal?鈥�
