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Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange ("abadidea") wrote:
"Hearing voices" happens to *almost everyone* at least a few times in their life, but people are often scared to admit they had a harmless, benign voice-hearing experience, or they even deny to themselves that it counted, because the phenomenon is associated with being extremely crazy and dangerous.
For example: have you ever *sworn* that you heard someone call your name, but no-one did? You can point what direction the voice came from in real physical space, but no-one's there? This happens to almost everyone at some point. That's "hearing voices." It's more likely to happen when you're stressed, tired, or really zoned out. Hearing someone calling for you is very common, but you also might swear you just heard your long-dead grandmother say her comforting catchphrase or your worst ex snarl something hurtful.
The fact that you might hear the voice of someone you know is dead, or get the sense that it's a powerful benevolent or malevolent entity's voice, leads many people to spiritual explanations. But it's just your own subconscious grabbing the microphone and noisy, messy brain signals cohering into something you can make sense of at the conscious level.
If voices repeatedly belittle you, threaten you, or urge you to do harmful things, you do need to get outside help to address the inner low-level conflicts that manifest in this high-level distress. But there are millions of people in the world who routinely hear harmless voices, and it's just another facet of the messy human experience. Many people can even sustain dialogue with their voices and find it a helpful way to sort out their thoughts.
And here's a very modern, technocentric metaphor that may help explain why voices can be so nonsensical or disconnected from what you were consciously thinking. Have you ever seen the video game "Hey You, Pikachu"? It has a very simple form of microphone voice control. To do voice recognition with so little processing power, it just takes anything you say and matches it to whichever of about a hundred game-related words the waveform resembles most. So you can say "Carrie's scared of bees" and it will hear "Caterpie".
The subconscious-to-voice wiring is doing something similar: compressing an infinite space of wibbly thought-signals into finite conscious constructs, and the meaning might get rather distorted in the process. It doesn't mean you're "crazy" if the result is sometimes rather strange or embarrassing.
Wow, I'm on a psychological longpost roll...