Schizophrenia Hearing Voices Research – Why Does It Happen!
The Shocking Brain Glitch Behind Voices in Schizophrenia Revealed!
“Mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, challenge our understanding of the brain’s ability to interpret reality. When signals between brain regions break down, the world perceived by the mind can become drastically altered.” – Anonymous.
A million voices inside your head are trying to take control of your life, even such thoughts gives us chills down the spine.
Well, some people have to deal with such nightmares daily, and we can’t even imagine how painful it is for them.
For decades Schizophrenia has been an area of interest for researchers. And after years of research, they have come across some shocking truths about what is behind the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenia patients have.
A new study has revealed a missing area of brain activity in Schizophrenia patients, who hear voices. Scientists have analyzed the brain wave data, and have come across a combination of two neurological functions that could potentially trigger auditory verbal hallucinations.
Some researchers from China have found proof of a breakdown in the ability to prepare the senses for specific words to be spoken, another area that filters our brain’s internal thoughts is also enhanced in schizophrenia patients, who experience auditory hallucinations. And for people without self-sound suppression and already enhanced noise-associated signals, thoughts will most definitely get jumbled up in their minds.
“People who suffer from auditory hallucinations can ‘hear’ sounds without external stimuli,” the team explains. “Impaired functional connections between motor and auditory systems in the brain mediate the loss of ability to distinguish fancy from reality.”
The was led by 2 neuroscience researchers Fuyin Yang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and colleagues, they examined the brains of 20 schizophrenia patients, who were experiencing auditory hallucinations and then compared them with another 20 schizophrenia patients, who did not experience such hallucinations and group of people who were not diagnosed with schizophrenia were taken as a control group for the study. The brain activity of all the groups was studied from the data of electroencephalograms, the people from all three groups were asked to asked to hear an audio snippet and verbalize it. After the analysis was performed the data showed shocking differences between the data from the 3 groups.
The data showed that the group of people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia showed reduced activity that was correlated with the brain’s ability to analyze and predict the sounds of the voice before the body even utters a single word, this is known as corollary discharge. This difference has also been observed in mouse models of schizophrenia.
The patients who were reported with auditory hallucinations have a hyperactive motor signal that instructs the bodies to speak, the team described this as an internal auditory representations. For the control group and schizophrenia patients without auditory hallucinations, the enhancement around the audio snippet was only there when someone was about to speak, but for patients with hallucinations, the enhancement was more generalized which increased the chaos inside the brain.
“Imprecise activation function of efference copy… results in the varied enhancement and sensitization of auditory cortex,” the researchers write in their paper.
“So it appears that auditory hallucinations arise when the uninhibited corollary discharge misinterprets the neural activity caused by the failure of our brains to specify our internal signal to speak,” Yang and team explained.
This is the reason why people struggle to differentiate between external voices and their internal thoughts, which confuses them and becomes a hurdle for them to understand and adjust to reality.
When we understand the cause of something, it gives us a direction to find the appropriate solutions for the cause, likewise, the importance of this study is that upon understanding the reasons behind these auditory hallucinations, there is hope for the development of new and better treatments for schizophrenia patients.
Schizophrenia Hearing Voices Research – Why Does It Happen!