Mentally well voice-hearers have a heightened ability to detect real speech

In this study, being explicitly primed to listen for speech didn’t benefit the voice-hearers any more than the controls, so something different seems to be going on compared with the detection of visual patterns in psychosis. The fMRI scans showed that, like the controls, the voice-hearers’ brains responded differently to potentially intelligible versus unintelligible sine-wave-speech. This suggests that voice-hearers aren’t biased to hear speech in any sound, but only when there is the possibility of a meaningful signal being present. The scans also revealed a key difference between the brain activity of the voice-hearers and the controls. In both, the potentially intelligible recordings engaged the brain network typically active in normal voice processing, but the voice-hearers showed stronger responses to this kind of speech in two regions: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the superior frontal gyrus (responses that were not seen when the recording was unintelligible). “This suggests an enhanced involvement of attention and sensorimotor processes, selectively when speech was potentially intelligible,” the research team writes. “This suggests that the fundamental mechanisms underlying hallucination involve – and may develop from – ordinary perceptual processes, illustrating the continuity of mundane and unusual experience.” This has implications for understanding the significant number of people who hallucinate voices but do not need psychiatric...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Mental health Perception Source Type: blogs