from the what-kind-of-voices-do-deaf-people-hear? dept.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614.html
Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests.
...
For the research, Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed 60 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia – 20 each in San Mateo, California; Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India. Overall, there were 31 women and 29 men with an average age of 34. They were asked how many voices they heard, how often, what they thought caused the auditory hallucinations, and what their voices were like.
...
The Americans experienced voices as bombardment and as symptoms of a brain disease caused by genes or trauma.
One participant described the voices as "like torturing people, to take their eye out with a fork, or cut someone's head and drink their blood, really nasty stuff." Other Americans (five of them) even spoke of their voices as a call to battle or war – "'the warfare of everyone just yelling.'"
Moreover, the Americans mostly did not report that they knew who spoke to them and they seemed to have less personal relationships with their voices, according to Luhrmann.
Among the Indians in Chennai, more than half (11) heard voices of kin or family members commanding them to do tasks. "They talk as if elder people advising younger people," one subject said. That contrasts to the Americans, only two of whom heard family members. Also, the Indians heard fewer threatening voices than the Americans – several heard the voices as playful, as manifesting spirits or magic, and even as entertaining. Finally, not as many of them described the voices in terms of a medical or psychiatric problem, as all of the Americans did.
In Accra, Ghana, where the culture accepts that disembodied spirits can talk, few subjects described voices in brain disease terms. When people talked about their voices, 10 of them called the experience predominantly positive; 16 of them reported hearing God audibly. "'Mostly, the voices are good,'" one participant remarked.
I think this may be related to how we deal (or don't deal) with mental healthcare in this country. There's such a stigma attached that people with mental health issues start to think the worst of themselves and it creates a feedback loop of destructive thoughts. Whereas in Africa and India where it's not such a big deal, people don't get worked up about it and just take it for what it is. Just my theory anyway.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:34AM
Please, Drop Dead Fred was a total clown and not threatening at all. But that was the 1990s before Bush W Laden steered American cultural priorities toward warmongering and fear. Terrorist American culture of the Bushbama Era is the problem. We need to get rid of it, it's causing Americans severe psychological trauma.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:39AM
USA #1! Obama Forever! Death to the Sandniggers!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:46AM
...this study is all bullshit, I'm a nice friendly voice. It's my head too, and we we get along just fine. Also you're hungry. Eat some peanuts. I want peanuts.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:49AM
Aw crap, we're out of peanuts.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:51AM
To the store to buy peanuts! Oooo, roooaaddd trip. This promises to be fun! Yes of course I remember where you left your wallet.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by gnuman on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:28PM
You see, that is not a problem. You can differentiate between your inner-voice and voices from outside.
Schizophrenia is when you can't differentiate. You believe that your hallucinations are someone talking behind the door, or behind you or similar.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:58AM
If you live in a culture of shit, eventually you smell like shit and sound like shit. Good work, Americans. You are shit.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @12:03PM
20 years ago I read a really cool book that seemed like science fiction but over time has really given me insight into the way people operate even in modern life. The book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [goodreads.com] by Julian Jaynes and he makes a surprisingly good argument for Bicameralism. [goodreads.com]
I've come to believe that "consciousness" is a spectrum -- for example when you are on auto-pilot driving home from work and you don't remember a single thing about the trip after you pull in the driveway -- that our brains are not monolithic but more like systems of systems that operate on different levels and sort of re-organize as the situation dictates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @12:06PM
Crap! Bicameralism [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @12:18PM
Ask the ghost in your head how many children she ran over with your car while you weren't paying attention. You might not care but the jury will. Get to know your personal spirits now, because if you don't you'll surely suffer the consequences if your auto-pilot is a reckless driver.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday January 31 2015, @03:43PM
I expected Jaynes work come up here. Julian Jaynes was closer to, say, Erich von Däniken than to a respected scientist. Looking at who published The Origin of Consciousness in 1976 should be your first clue that something is wrong: it's a mass-market publisher, not a university press.
As a teenager I read Jaynes book after hearing mention of his work in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash [amazon.com]. Sure, his eloquent style was initially impressive, but soon one starts to notice problems in the text. Perhaps the most significant is that all of his examples are drawn from the Near East in centuries BC, as if any events there could affect the rest of the world. However, if primitive human societies had the features he described, there would have been more evidence for this from explorers; encounters with hitherto uncontacted populations have occurred even in the 20th century, when fieldworkers are now more sensitive to describing the specific traits of the populations they study, and yet Jaynes's claims have not been confirmed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:47PM
It is by far imperfect. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of insight there.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:52PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @06:07PM
And your argument is that some of the evidence is not there. Not all of the evidence, just some of it.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:14PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:46PM
Not the point. Your "counterevidence" does not invalidate the general concepts he's talking about, only one specific line of reasoning that examines them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Saturday January 31 2015, @12:18PM
What if it's environmental rather than cultural? I wonder what happens if you take one of these Americans with angry, unruly voices talking to them and displace them to Ghana, tell them to get to know their voice, and keep them kind of secluded from the culture of their new home.
As time passes, will the voice that they hear become more kind? Maybe it's the magnetism of the earth, the way the air smells, the radio/microwave/whatever spectrum pollution, or any number of other things like that.
Anyone know if there's been a study like that? :3
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @12:40PM
That's what I got out of it. Something is affecting the brain to make schizophrenic experiences more or less threatening. And that something is interpersonal relationships and communalism.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GDX on Saturday January 31 2015, @03:27PM
I think that there is also possible a big sample bias due to cultural reasons, basically how much one is going to tell or hidden that they hear voices and its relation to the type of voice.
As example:
In USA: the people tend to hidden positive voices because the social stigma of mental disorder is greater than its benefit in this case, where if they are negative the benefit to tell and receive treatment is greater than the social stigma.
In India or Ghana: the people tend to tell in the open the positive voice because they are accepted by their society, while tend to hide the negative ones due to possibly being labelled possessed or being a bad witch and then receive some bad treatment by the society.
(Score: 2) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:25PM
I think you're right on!
There also seems to be a lot of social stigma about mental illness in general in some parts of the world. Like in the USA, I guess it's pretty common to try and "hide" any sort of mental illness if at all possible, or at least keep it a lot more private, but my friend in Sweden once told me that he thinks that sort of thing is odd.
He said something like, "What's the big deal with keeping something like that hidden? It's an illness like anything else. People don't try to hide it when they have the flu."
So, cultural stuff like that probably does contribute a lot when it comes to some people hearing voices that aren't benevolent or whatevs. Maybe, idk. :p
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:57PM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:18PM
That goes back to the pros and cons. In the U.S. you are unlikely to get competent treatment for your disorder so the major pro of talking about it isn't there.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @01:14PM
also you cannot undo being able to read.
once you are "forced to be able to read" then you cannot look at this {A} and NOT read it.
we are not taught to NOT be able to read.
anyone know how to go about learning to be able not to read? like turning it off and on?
(Score: 1) by t-3 on Saturday January 31 2015, @07:09PM
I imagine a susceptible person could use hypnosis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01 2015, @05:51PM
Maybe you can practice looking at it as a picture that you are trying to draw accurately.
Many artists practice doing stuff that some autistic savants do- e.g. seeing stuff as it is, and not converting it symbolically.
But do you really want to practice switching off the autoreading thing instead of say practicing making it or other skills better? I personally find it useful that I can often scan a page and spot a spelling error or interesting word very quickly.
Try this too: http://cognitivefun.net/test/2 [cognitivefun.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:53PM
I've always wondered whether people who "hear voices" are just misunderstanding their inner monologue and thinking its somebody else. Do they really have multiple inner monologues, one or more of which they have no control over, or is it just their own and they think its external? If its multiple, it'd be something like multiple personality disorder, only not to the extent that the "other personality" can actually come out.
That different cultures result in different personalities for the "voices" makes sense though - America is all about violence, greed, and selfishness, so its not surprising that the "voices" of 'disturbed' Americans are exactly that.
(Score: 1) by gnuman on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:32PM
They can't differentiate between inner voices and external voices. So they hear voices, like outside the door, but it's only in their head. But they will swear the voice came outside the door, or window, or behind them.
This can also happen to people that are not schizophrenic, but the difference is it is a one-of occurrence. For example, when you are falling asleep, in that awake-sleep state you can sometimes hear something that ain't there. But for schizophrenic, that happens all the time.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:33PM
AFAIK it sounds a lot real to mental patients. I read somewhere about a woman who had constantly had a voice tell her to kill herself. That is a very scary experience and explains her multiple suicide attempts. Now I also had suicide thoughts when I was in depression but it was always me thinking and over-thinking, never a constant voice. Sometimes an imaginary argument I am having with my enemy will end up me imagining that enemy telling me to kill myself, but I was always aware of myself being its driver. Losing that driver's seat is indeed a serious mental illness that needs immediate attention.
So, there is a difference, I suppose.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:55PM
But India is all about call centers and taking a shit in the street, yet the Indian schizos don't hear voices asking them if their problem was solved or if they'd like to defecate in the boulevard.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nishi.b on Sunday February 01 2015, @02:43AM
A few years ago some studies were done using functional MRI with patients that just had to report when they heard a voice.
Here is a (paywaled) review [sciencedirect.com]
They found out that the primary auditory cortex was activated, just as if they were actually listening to a voice from their ears.
This is probably related to abnormal connections within the brain : you can filter out a lot of noise from what your ears record when you are listening to someone talk because the front of the brain has backward connections to the primary sensory input regions.
But it seems that in their case there is more than filtering going on, and a part of their brain creates sentences (like when you are thinking for yourself) and outputing those through the normal hearing system.
Wikipedia mentions this [wikipedia.org]
So it should not surprise anyone that the environment and culture of the patient influences what he/she hears...
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday January 31 2015, @11:58PM
It's somewhat obvious that hallucinations and delusions are influenced by cultural factors.
No one used to say there was a chip in their brain in the 1950s
Although maybe the cultures who believe in ghosts may be on to something.
The psychotic mind may amplify the unspoken, unheard cultural conflicts;
Thence, America's war with war and India's paternalistic treatment of the emerging adult may become manifest in the voices.
It's interesting how pleasant and unpleasant voices can go hand in hand. One person with schizophrenia I knew was quite upset that the medications took away voices telling him how good and powerful he was as well as the ones that told him to kill himself.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday February 01 2015, @03:35AM
Most mental people are usually just affected them self. But with "voices" etc, do you want to allow the presence of a person in your surroundings that may actually kill or seriously harm you because they heard their voice say so? Sure it's not fair but taking the chance can have a steep cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 18 2015, @11:00AM
Here in Russian, this voices are KGB agents, simply. Who are just kidding on everyone.
Cheers to everyone who heared voices!