The Neuromantics – S3, Ep 3

Some people hear voices in their heads but are not suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The voices are “non clinical”, and the people who experience them “non-clinical voice hearers”. One question that arises is: do NCVHs also hear external speech in a different way; more distinctly, perhaps? According to experiments conducted by Ben Alderson-Day et al (“Distinct Processing of Ambiguous Speech in People with Non-clinical Auditory Verbal Hallucinations”, 2017), the answer is yes, though it’s a complex picture. When played excerpts of degraded but potentially intelligible speech, NCVH participants are better than their controls at recognising it. Enhanced perceptual processing seems to be at work. At the same time, an element of mystery clings to the inner voice these people hear: if it doesn’t coincide with external reality and it isn’t “imagined”, then what is it? You could say that this paper is about removing layers – trying to get at the mechanistic processes underlying individual experiences. Majorie-Ann Watts’s witty short story “Mrs Calder and the Hyena” (from the collection Are They Funny, Are They Dead?, 2010) approaches the same problem from a different direction, casting doubt on experiences that are too general to be authentic. Mrs Calder is elderly and ill. She may be on the cusp of dementia. She certainly annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she sees people naked on the tube and floating through the clouds towards Heathrow). The hindrances to right perception, in this case, are not Mrs Calder’s hallucinations but the routines of daily life, the insensitivity of her carers, and the received wisdom of impatient medics. Nostra culpa: we’re sorry for the delay to this episode of The Neuromantics, the podcast that brings science and literature together, but we’re back in the saddle now. Listen, like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, if you care to. And spread the word!