🧠 “The Brain Can Hear What Isn’t There” — Auditory Hallucination
1. Neurological Definition
An auditory hallucination occurs when the brain perceives sound without any external stimulus — such as hearing one’s name called, conversations, or music when no actual sound is present.
(Harvard Medical School, Department of Neuropsychiatry, 2021)
2. Brain Regions Involved
The temporal lobe, particularly the auditory cortex, which normally processes real sound, becomes self-activated even in silence.
As a result, the brain creates synthetic sounds — much like “hearing during a dream” while awake.
(University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2020)
3. Why It Can Happen to Healthy Individuals
Even people without mental illness can experience auditory hallucinations due to several factors:
- Sleep deprivation: The brain enters a semi-dreamlike state while awake.
- Extreme silence: In soundproof or quiet environments, the brain begins “filling in” auditory input to compensate for the absence of sound.
- Stress or elevated dopamine levels: Small noises may be misinterpreted as speech or meaningful sound.
(Yale University, School of Medicine, 2019)
4. The Predictive Mechanism
The brain constantly predicts what it expects to hear.
When no sound is detected, it auto-fills sensory gaps — generating phantom sounds to maintain the illusion of a normal environment.
This process is known as a predictive coding error — a misfiring in the brain’s expectation system.
(UCL Computational Neuroscience Lab, 2022)
5. Treatment and Therapy
If such experiences occur frequently, consultation with a psychiatrist or neurologist is recommended, as it can signal:
- Chronic stress
- Depression
- Early-stage psychosis or schizophrenia
Common treatment approaches include CBT for psychosis and mindfulness training — designed to help individuals distinguish real sounds from brain-generated ones.
(Harvard Psychology and Neuroscience Review, 2023)
📚 References
Harvard Medical School. (2021). Auditory Hallucinations and Neural Activation Patterns.
University College London. (2020). Predictive Coding in Perceptual Anomalies.
Yale School of Medicine. (2019). Auditory Cortex Overactivation in Non-psychotic Individuals.
Harvard Psychology Review. (2023). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Auditory Hallucination.
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