![]() ![]() The voices are there to trick you into believing this unreality that we face on a daily basis. Schizophrenia is about monstrous ideas that are reinforced by voices. Schizophrenia is not about hearing voices. This is what my mind tells me, a truth so far off from reality. How can you hear someone without their presence? It is impossible. I cannot see him, but I know he is there. His voice sounds dark, angry, and monstrous, with an audio quality unequaled. A shadowy monster that I am unable to see. They are all different permutations of the same chant.īehind the eerie voices, lies an abusive, terrifying figure. You cannot escape.” That is the underlying persecutory theme that they speak of. What is it that they are saying? “We are here. When spies are following me, I can hear their whispers from dark alleyways. When demons chase me, my mind tricks me into hearing their footsteps. They mesh together to create a woven pattern of unreality, both tortuous and unseen. For me, the beliefs and voices are one and the same. How is it that our minds can hear voices from nothingness? Is this a cruel trick of nature? How can a disease be so bizarre and menacing? The voices can unfold in different ways. These voices come from various origins and seem to have a conscious of their own. An extension of these beliefs are dark, eerie voices from unseen places. What is it that brings this terror to us? Schizophrenia is a disease that is toxic to our minds, and brings on unusual beliefs and behaviors. ![]() Therein lies persecution and horror of otherworldly origin. Frangou's research team will replicate and expand the current observations in larger samples to determine their relevance to hallucinations across diagnoses and to quantify the association of tonotopic disruption to auditory cortical activation and connectivity during actual hallucinatory experiences.Within the psychotic mind lies a mysterious place filled with voices and shadowy figures. This is particularly exciting because it means that it might be possible to identify potential vulnerable individuals, such as the offspring of schizophrenia patients, very early on."Īccording to the authors, in addition to helping doctors spot people who are likely to experience hallucinations before the symptoms appear or become severe, the auditory cortex may be an area of consideration for novel neurmodulation methods to help patients who already have symptoms. "Because the tonotopic map is established when people are still infants and remains stable throughout life, our study findings suggest that the vulnerability to develop "voices" is linked a deviance in the organization of the auditory system that occurs during infancy and precedes speech development and the onset of psychotic symptoms by many years. Additionally, the mapping of most sound frequencies to parts of the auditory cortex appeared "scrambled" in patients with schizophrenia, suggesting that the normal processes for the organized representation of sound in the brain are disrupted in schizophrenia. ![]() They found that patients showed greater activation in response to most sound frequencies. The team obtained tonotopic maps from 16 patients with schizophrenia with a history of recurrent auditory hallucination and 22 healthy study participants. In healthy brains, these sounds are processed in a very organized fashion each frequency activates a specific part of the auditory cortex forming a tonotopic map. Specifically, the research team used an ultra-high field scanner with a powerful 7 Tesla magnet to obtain high-resolution images of brain activity while study participants listened passively to tones across a range of very low to very high frequencies. "Since auditory hallucinations feel like real voices, we wanted to test whether patients with such experiences have abnormalities in the auditory cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes real sounds from the external environment," says Sophia Frangou, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The study findings, which appears this week in the Nature Partner Journal NPJ Schizophrenia, suggest that the vulnerability to develop "voices" is probably established many years before symptoms begin. Tonotopy is the ordered representation of sound frequency in the auditory cortex, which is established in utero and infancy and which does not rely on higher-order cognitive operations. They found that schizophrenic patients who experienced auditory hallucinations had abnormal tonotopic organization of the auditory cortex. To investigate the biological origins of hearing "voices" in patients with schizophrenia, a team led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai used ultra-high field imaging to compare the auditory cortex of schizophrenic patients with healthy individuals. ![]()
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