
When I stopped hearing the voices in my head - DanBC
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/13/hearing-voices-head-drugs-therapy
======
SCAQTony
Book: "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" —
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Brea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\)#Breakdown_of_bicameralism)

Theory: The brain has two hemispheres: One does the talking and one does the
listening. Sometimes we react because the "self" is the last to know or just
reacts not realizing it is a self evaluation below our awareness. (Dog goes to
bite your hand and you react.) We then try to assign order to that chaos with
a reason such as "god[s]", or "spirit[s] warned us or made us do so.

Snippet: "..."... Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes,
include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia and the general sense of
need for external authority in decision-making...."

~~~
vorg
Are there any more recent works that develop on this idea with new research
and historical analysis, or is this 40-year old book still the best there is?

~~~
SCAQTony
"The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’
hypothesis" (2006)

[http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/...](http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/index.html)

a Institute of Neurology, London, UK

b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy

c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna, Italy

Reprint requests to: Dr Andrea Eugenio Cavanna Amedeo Avogadro University
Corso Mazzini, 18 - 28100 Novara - Italy E-mail: acavanna@ion.ucl.ac.uk

Received: October 2006 Accepted for publication: January 2007

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namenumber
Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around
here i have some first hand experience with.

That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait,
that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of
responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took
a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that puzzle,
and at the end of the day i settled for a mix of "currently unknown exactly
how that is done" (sort of like consciousness itself, i guess) to "wow,
reality sure does have some extra layers of "fun" i hadn't really been
informed about.

If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of
being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession
of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go
outside your acknowledged "knowns".

Now, i was lucky enough to have a very supportive and patient family that
viewed it as something that could be managed outside of the realm of
antipsychotic therapy. I'm not saying that handling it with prescribed drugs
is necessarily a bad idea, if it works for you then i hope it continues to do
so.

Sorry for the rant, but i was just reminded of how weird all of that stuff was
to go through. Its been a while since i thought about it.

~~~
namenumber
I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a
brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully
functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i
occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i
had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the
array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my
normal waking time).

It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i
guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a
slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake.

I guess i'll never know.

~~~
Leszek
I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer
trust your sense: are you _certain_ that you actually heard a fully
functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe
that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just
your perception of it?

I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience
something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of
it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the
input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce
it.

~~~
namenumber
You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This
was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my
time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify
binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in
the evening.)

Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates
seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be
relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am
awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i
was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted
itself).

So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard
in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when
you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests
itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you
need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This
mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments
and moods.

So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning
your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental
tricks you can

Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was
more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really
quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of
the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.

I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.

------
khed
It should be noted that studies looking at normal vs no/reduced antipsychotic
therapy in patients with psychotic dieases have indicated that in the long
term patients may do significantly better without antipsychotic therapy.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23824214](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23824214)
[http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-t...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-
taking-the-long-view.shtml)

------
cygnus_a
I often have intense fantasies about conversations with personal mentors,
historical figures and/or deities (what would Buddha say? How about Einstein?
etc). Obviously I can't reproduce their thoughts, but knowing a little about
them, I can try to think like them

Surely they're not as visceral or reflexive as the author's voices. But I have
always found value in empathizing with fantasized mentors, which has given me
confidence in my opinions.

~~~
sageikosa
I sometimes talk to myself or to hypothetical instances of other people I
know. I try to do this quietly at times since I know it might not be perceived
favorably by others. Mainly I do this to verbally externalize thoughts and
force them back into my auditory memory (deliberately), hopefully reinforcing
or bolstering a position I want to take or a course of action I need to take
later.

I hope I never lose track that I am initiating those conversations...I'm old
enough to be well past the standard age for developing schizophrenia...but if
I did lose track, I at least have my atheism to fall back upon and my memory
of having read through Jaynes a couple of times.

~~~
sevensor
> I try to do this quietly

If you hold a mobile phone to your ear, nobody will give you a second look.

~~~
iagooar
Unless you get a real call while doing so.

~~~
jacquesm
"Please hold while I get the other line"

(what should really worry you is if you hear 'ok.')

------
dx211
I have this thing where I wake up at 5:00 AM and my internal monologue sounds
like someone twisting the tuning knob back and forth on a radio. Anyone know a
name for that?

~~~
ashark
Kind of a horrifying cacophony? Mind is racing but unfocused, and you can't
force it to focus? Makes it difficult to go back to sleep?

Yeah, I get that every so often. Every couple months, maybe. No idea what it
might be called.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think have that multiple times a week; almost feels like a waterfall in my
head. Sometimes a song gets stuck in my head, and I just hum it until I'm
"done waking up".

~~~
ashark
Oof, the times when it's one or more songs are the _worst_. I'd forgotten
about that one.

~~~
SCHiM
But isn't that just called 'having a song stuck in your head?'

I almost always have a song running in the background, never the same, but I
wake up to a song and I go to sleep with a song.

~~~
Riseed
Having a song stuck in your head is like having a working player stuck on
repeat-1.

Sometimes "one or more songs" manifests not as one song at a time, but instead
like a cacophony of players all stuck on repeat-1.

------
NickHaflinger
Sound different from the life experience of a woman I met recently who also
had to withdraw from uni through overwork. That was over fifteen years ago.
Unfortunately she was sectioned by her family (who all then skipped off to
America). She's been prescribed a cocktail of psychotropic pharmaceuticals
ever since. She has developed type two diabetes, disruption of thyroid
activity, kidney damage, fluid retention and dangerously overweight. A once
intelligent and good looking woman reduced to a shambling wreak like something
out of the living dead and can't even remember what you told her yesterday.
Not much of a cure after fifteen years of 'treatment'. The mental health
professionals must know the damage the drugs are doing. But I guess they are
making a good living out of her. \-------

I find that whole article manipulative and disingenuous in the extreme. A full
page free advertisement for the psycho-pharma industry.

~~~
frenchy
Did it ever strike you that maybe the physician recommended against the
pharmaceutical treatment, but the patient still went for it anyway because "I
have to do _something_ "?

------
kefka
So the solution is to provide drugs that somehow deaden random neurons in
somewhat random parts of the brain, and hope they don't cause massive side
effects down the line?

Just like that dental article a few days ago, doesn't the current psychiatric
medicine seem like using a backhoe on a flower pot? Sure, you move the soil,
but you trash the porch.

~~~
troym
> So the solution is to provide drugs that somehow deaden random neurons in
> somewhat random parts of the brain, and hope they don't cause massive side
> effects down the line?

The author didn't share a diagnosis, nor did he or she share the specific
medication(s) that helped. Given that, how can you conclude that the drugs
"deadened neurons"?

I share your skepticism of modern psychiatric medicine, and yet I think you
might be missing some understanding and/or empathy for the patient. He or she
is describing schizophrenia and major depressive disorder [1], and while often
found together, either one can be utterly debilitating. It would not surprise
me if the patient had the same concerns as you and I, but was so desperate, so
hopeless that they were willing to take the risk.

[1] not a doctor, therapist, counselor or anything close

[edited to fix footnote]

~~~
khed
I am a physician. The few studies comparing long term antipsychotic use in
schizophrenia have found that people do better with low/no medication. They
are more functional, have fewer relapses and better quality of life. This is
still a controversial view in psychiatry but the tide may be turning. Thomas
Insel, the head of the NIMH, has stated

"antipsychotic medication, which seemed so important in the early phase of
psychosis, appeared to worsen prospects for recovery over the long-term" in
reference to these studies.

~~~
khed
This is a nice overview.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23512950](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23512950)

------
contingencies
For a few years, every time my mind was momentarily still it would repeat the
word "death". It never bothered me, and I always interpreted it
philosophically (eg. as a meditational aid) and put it down to reading too
much Buddhist literature.

~~~
archagon
Sounds a bit like OCD. If I keep my mind still, something terrible always
fills the void and I have to give my consciousness something to focus on. When
I was younger, I referred to this as "hearing voices"; it was a huge relief
when I eventually found out about OCD and its symptoms. It's exhausting!

~~~
contingencies
Thanks for your response, though I don't believe my experience matched the
symptoms of OCD, as there was no O-C relation, C or D.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
Can't help but be reminded of Jayne's Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

------
mirimir
We all have at least one of these voices in our heads. Like the author, some
of us give them names, and fancy conversations among them. But for the most
part, they simply occur to us as "I".

"I" likes to think that it's running the show, but really it's at best a
commentator. All too often, that "I" fucks up and sabotages. As HenryTheHorse
notes, in Buddhism it's called the "monkey mind". It's a machine that evolved
for survival and reproduction.

Anyway, it's useful to distinguish "It" \-- the "monkey mind" survival machine
-- from ones identity. And that's a practice to engage in. Understanding is
the booby prize ;)

~~~
DanBC
No, hearing voices is a very different experience to the regular internal
monologue that everyone has.

People hearing voices perceive those heard voices in the same way they'd
perceive an actual person talking to them.

People experience different voices, but it's reasonably common to experience
the voice as male and standing behind you. But the voice could be whispering
(like white noise), or robotic, and it could appear to come from people
actually in the room or from objects.

~~~
mirimir
How do you know that? Have you experienced both? Otherwise, you're at best
interpreting what others have said. Or maybe just what others have written
about the subject.

~~~
DanBC
I've spoken to people who hear voices and they decribe the differences very
clearly, and there's plenty of research about this.

~~~
mirimir
Fair enough. But I've heard many sorts of voices in my head. There's the usual
one that observes and echoes what I'm doing. But there are other voices that
come with stress and anxiety. Sometimes they warn me, alert me to danger.
Sometimes they converse, and get into arguments. Then there are other fainter
voices that come with various drugs, under various circumstances.

When people seek help about such matters, they often find themselves working
with therapists who have this or that conceptual framework. And so patients
learn to frame their experience accordingly. Explanations are comforting.

So anyway, I'm dubious about the distinction. I think that it's an artifact of
social norms and therapeutic bullshit.

~~~
namenumber
In so far as what the brain could be without the strictures of society and its
learned/forced behaviours, thats an interesting question that i hope no
psychologist ever really goes too deep into trying to figure out. I guess
parts of it can be deconstructed, if that is your cup of tea, and as long as
that works for an individual then hey, thats pretty great.

What i find missing in most conceptual frameworks is a greater response to the
raw constructive capacity of the human brain. Most inquiries into mental voice
states (non-consciously controlled ones) deal not directly with the capacity
of the brain for such activity, and its implications for phenomenology of
being, but with it as an outlier to normal human function. Granted, the reason
for this being that its what pays the bills, and i assume a lot of people
don't want the hassle and can't really afford to spend time trying to figure
it out. Thats perfectly reasonable.

As for the great phenomenology of mind/being/brain discussion, its good fun.
I'm pretty much consigned to the fact that artifacts are what we have, and
what we will forever work with. In my opinion the idea that the natural state
is superior in matters of mind is as much an artifact of a particular social
conception as all others. Often the conscious sabotages, often the unconscious
does. Believing either to be naturally superior without any form of proper
data sets relating to weighted choicemaking over an extensive period of time
for multiple individuals is still just a statement of faith, regardless of how
you assemble it. (And good luck finding the objective criteria on which
judgements as to superiority of choices are concerned.)

Basically, its a tug of war between conscious and unconscious, and i think we
should be glad that it is thus and not unnecessarily elevate one over the
other. But hey, thats just like, my opinion man.

~~~
mirimir
My framework draws primarily on Burroughs, Hofstadter, NLP and est/Landmark.
Plus lots of SF, lately Greg Egan and Peter Watts. I've also practiced Aikido,
and played in hardcore whitewater.

The distinction between conscious and unconscious is too simplistic, I think.
There's a continuum in multiple dimensions. But I do agree that it's all
useful in one way or another. It was simplistic of me to dismiss
consciousness.

We're all familiar with the process of learning motor skills. Much conscious
attention is required at first. We screw up and get feedback. We think about
it. We listen to coaching. We keep practicing. And eventually, it becomes
automatic.

I believe that the same process applies in all areas of being. It's a little
hard to get, because the learning goes out of consciousness. You know what
you've learned only through measuring performance.

------
peter303
I offer her kudos for suceeding!

