The secret to both might lie in how our brains experience the world
Serial killer David Berkowitz, also known as the “Son of Sam,” famously claimed that he heard voices in the form of a dog telling him to commit murder. But hearing voices isn’t necessarily a sign of psychosis. In fact, according to the authors of a recent study published in the journal Brain, enhanced attention-related nerual pathways might cause these illusory sounds. People hear them because their brains may be especially primed to pick up speech.
“It’s true that lots of people who hear voices have serious mental health issues,” Ben Alderson-Day, a psychological research at Durham University and lead author on the study told Popular Science. “But roughly 5 to 15 percent of the general population will have some experience of hearing unusual voices at some point in their lives. We think potentially up to one percent might have pretty frequent experiences and just don’t really tell anyone and get on with their everyday lives.” more
