“Sound is transmitted in three stages. The outer ear acts as a funnel to catch and direct it,
though many people lacking outer ears hear just fine. When the sound waves hit the fanlike eardrum, it moves the first tiny bone, whose head fits in the cuplike socket on the second, which then moves the third, which presses like a piston against the soft, fluid-filled inner ear, in which there is a snail-shaped tube called the cochlea, containing hairs whose purpose is to signal the auditory nerve cells. When the fluid vibrates, the hairs move, exciting the nerve cells and they send their information to the brain” (Ackerman 177).
Hearing is probably the most misleading sense that we share. How many times have you personally misheard a comment someone made, or a secret that someone told you? This is one main reason why there is so much drama caused and false accusations. People say that repeat what they heard, however, what they thought was heard may not have been accurate. Another thing that one may not realize is that we talk to ourselves constantly; whether you say it out loud or just in your head. Many times we do something embarrassing in front of someone we are trying to impress and then will yell at ourselves in our head “why would you do that, you’re such an idiot!” There’s nothing wrong when that happens, that’s just our inner thought that we all share.
However, when people start to hear voices that actually reply to their thoughts, that’s a real problem. One may just blow this off and not think anything of it; however according to Dr. Paul Fink chairman of psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, that’s not the case. He says that “Hearing voices can be a serious symptom of psychosis or neurological impairment. It shouldn’t be taken lightly” (Hearing Voices).
Some doctors are put under the impression that the imaginary voices these people experience are actually their own inner thoughts (Hearing Voices). The voices seem to somehow develop a specific pattern that the person will identify as a separate voice (Hearing Voices). “When people with serious mental illnesses hear voices, they believe that the voices are real. They’ll say, ‘There’s a voice telling me I should kill myself,’ or ‘There’s a man telling me to kill my mother,’” Dr. Fink says. “They don’t think it’s a hallucination, and they feel like they have to do what the voice says” (Hearing Voices).
The most common reason for hearing voices is schizophrenia. However, hearing voices could also be a sign of mania, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, or drug and alcohol abuse (Hearing Voices). Some of the more simple reasons for people hearing voices could be a defective hearing aid or a side effect of a medication (Hearing Voices). In some cases, when people are extremely depressed or just about to fall asleep, are able to hear voices that are calling out their name (Hearing Voices). Many doctors are still unsure of what causes this; however, they don’t look at it as being harmless (Hearing Voices).
“It has happened to me just once in my adult life,” says Betsy Comstock, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “I was just walking down the street doing some shopping when I thought I heard my mother calling to me—and no one ever spoke my name like my mother did. A lot of people have that experience, but we don’t think it’s any cause for alarm” (Hearing Voices).
Sometimes people hear voices that say a lot more disturbing things then just calling a name (Crawford). This could be from a voice telling you that you’re worthless and need to die, to keeping up a running commentary about what’s going on (Crawford). Also, the voices can discuss the inner thoughts of the person who hears them, so they think everyone around them can hear their private conversations discussed aloud (Crawford). This reminds me of one of my favorite movies that I watched called “A Beautiful Mind.” It’s about a man, John Nash, who is a mathematical genius and suffers from schizophrenia. He hears voices and actually sees the people who are speaking these voices. John Nash believes that he is working top secretly with the government has asked him to help with breaking Soviet codes. This is a good example of how serious people can get when they hear these auditory voices speaking to them.
Michael Crawford, a graduate of UCSC, started to hear voices and was admitted into Alhambra CPC for studying (Crawford). The words that he would hear though, were not disturbing. He would normally just hear a woman’s voice yelling his name, “Mike!” But for Michael Crawford, it wasn’t what the voice said that frightened him (Crawford). Instead, it was the intention he thought was behind it (Crawford). He thought that the woman who was shouting his name was coming out to kill him and he was more scared of her than anything else in his life (Crawford).
Michael was determined to make these voices and hallucinations stop. It was very difficult for him to distinguish between real people talking to him, and the voices that he was hearing (Crawford). One situation he gave during his stay at the hospital was when he was down by the nurse’s station. He thought he heard the nurse ask him a question and he responded only to find her looking down at her desk (Crawford). He now realizes that the nurse hadn’t addressed him at all and it was actually one of his voices speaking to him (Crawford).
Michael was told by numerous people to just ignore the voices, however, it was far from being that easy. According to Michael, he didn’t have the choice because by the time he could make the decision to ignore it; he had already been frightened by hearing it (Crawford). After a period of time though, he did try extremely hard to ignore the voices and surprisingly after a few days of doing this, the voices stopped (Crawford). The hospital staff was very shocked when Michael told them this because normally you can’t just make these voices stop (Crawford). Even though he wasn’t physically hearing the voices anymore, it still bothered him later on in his life. Any time he would hear someone call his name, it still frightened him because it reminded him of the woman who used to shout his name (Crawford).
Works Cited
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, 1990.
Hearing Voices. “What Your Symptom Is Telling You.” 18 March 2009
< http://vitabluenc.mothernature.com/Library/Bookshelf/Books/16/106.cfm>
Crawford, Michael. “Hearing Voices.” 18 March 2009
<http://www.geometricvisions.com/schizoaffective-disorder/voices.html>
Before
For my Hearing essay I plan to write an informative paper. My goal is to give information on why people suffer from hearing voices. I plan to include people who have dealt with this type of situation before and how they handled it. Also, I will share some personal things that I know about this problem. My intended audience I am writing this essay for is myself.
After
After completing this essay, I feel that I have accomplished my goals. I think I succeeded in writing an informative essay on hearing voices. I also researched and found people who have suffered from this problem and included their stories in my essay. However, I think my essay can still use some more work by including more personal experiences from my own life.
