Professor Waters' best guess is that "everyday" hallucinations may share common mechanisms with more serious hallucinations. And what makes a hallucination distressing in some situations and not in others?" "We're still trying to understand whether there are different forms of hallucinations or whether there is only one type that takes different shapes. "In the past 100 years it's always been about schizophrenia in the past couple of years we've suddenly ramped up investigations outside of schizophrenia," she said.
Research into this kind of hallucination is in its very early days, said Professor Waters. In some cultures it's acceptable, for example, to hear the voices of your dead relatives. This includes hearing their name being called, the phone ringing or seeing someone sitting at the end of their bed. Hallucinations aren't always intrusive, negative and scary, even in conditions like schizophrenia.Ībout 70 per cent of healthy people experience benign hallucinations when they are falling asleep, said Professor Waters. Almost two out of three people have benign hallucinations The big question is whether the same kind of processes are responsible for less extreme hallucinations. "It allows the processing of images and sound that would normally be inhibited," she said. Psychoactive drugs could also upset the relationship between the sense processing parts of the brain and the frontal lobe in a similar way, said Professor Waters. Similarly, people with Parkinson's disease appear to have an overactive visual cortex, which results in images being generated in their brain of things that aren't actually there. This results in random sounds and speech fragments being generated. One major theory is that hallucinations are caused when something goes wrong in the relationship between the brain's frontal lobe and the sensory cortex, said neuropsychologist Professor Flavie Waters from the University of Western Australia.įor example, research suggests auditory hallucinations experienced by people with schizophrenia involve an overactive auditory cortex, the part of the brain that processes sound, said Professor Waters. Normally our brain is good at distinguishing between a sound or image that is occurring in the outside world, and one that is just a product of our mind. We're still trying to understand whether there are different forms of hallucinations or whether there is only one type that takes different shapes.
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