Overactive pattern recognition or actual auditory hallucination?*

[snarp]

The thermostat catches and the A/C hums to life; very clearly but muffled, as if it were my ringtone and my phone were on the other side of the house, I hear the opening of "Stronger Than You." At the words "back together," it fades back into the sound of the fan.

(* Is there actually much of a difference, causatively speaking?)

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Is there actually much of a difference, causatively speaking?

In this case, probably not. We used to use a psychological test where one of the flag questions for psychosis was "Do you sometimes hear voices that other people don't?" Every single person who wasn't psychologically knowledgeable enough to recognize that as a psychosis flag would answer yes. Because everybody does at times. (I also got a lot of yeses to "Do you see spirits?" Not one of those people was psychotic. Seeing spirits is pretty normal in certain cultures and also in California.) Thankfully we no longer use that test.

Pattern recognition isn't the only cause of auditory hallucinations, though. There's also the type where it's culturally expected to have saints/dead relatives talk to you, so it's basically vivid daydreams that you and everyone interpret as not coming from you. There's some evidence that psychosis-type auditory hallucinations are caused by a glitch in the brain's ability to recognize one's thoughts as one's own. (Similar to the delusion that your hand isn't your hand, but belongs to somebody else.) However, there's obviously other stuff going on as well because on those cases the content of the thoughts tends to be hostile, negative, and weird - it's not just a regular stream of consciousness externalized.

Have you read Oliver Sacks' book Hallucinations? It's quite interesting though it primarily focuses on visual hallucinations caused by stuff like migraines, blindness, and brain damage.

[jesse_the_k]

I've got the fridge hum, plus the AC yowl (variable fan), plus the tinnitus. Sometimes it sounds like the ice cream truck, although not many of those play "Air on a G String."

Otherwise it doesn't cohere into music, simply turns into many car alarms in the next county over, with tornado warnings plus the beat of my heart.