According to research, 5 – 10 percent of all individuals, including healthy ones, hear voices linked to their dead. Researchers have no knowledge what happens in the brain when individuals hear these “auditory hallucinations.”
It is normally presumed that these hallucinations are experienced by not just those with psychiatric conditions. However, according to research, 70 % of people identified with schizophrenia usually hear such voices.
Schizophrenics don’t make good subjects for research associated to hallucinations since they consume drugs and medication that may have side effects, obscuring the results.
Why do these hallucinations occur?
Hallucinations arise when a person’s sensory imprints don’t match with their brain’s expectations.
Some research also disclose hallucinations may occur when the brain has been influenced by prior impressions and translates sensory perceptions inaccurately as a result.
New robotic technique
Orepic has now formulated research which may induce the above two mechanisms concurrently.
As a part of the research, blindfolded individuals were asked to press a lever placed in front of them. As they did so, a robotic arm touched them on their back.
With some training, their brain begins to perceive that it was their own hand which was touching them in their back.
After some practice, the research experienced a slight alteration.
Now, as the applicants moved the lever, the robotic arm touched them after a slight delay.
This led the brain to conclude that somebody else was present. Now the brain clarifies that delayed sensory response as someone different being present and touching them in the back, Orepic said.
In the following part of the trial, the subjects were made to hear sounds into which they had mixed either very lenient voices – occasionally the subjects’ own, sometimes someone else’s – or not at all.
Amazingly, it turned out that individuals having practiced the ‘delayed touch experiment’ were more likely to hear voices in the sound presented even if no voice had been mixed.
The experiment confirms that the instruments behind the hallucinations are essentially in everyone’s brain, Orepic says.
But for some reason, some individuals are more vulnerable to them than others, he adds.
