To those who responded to my question about whether auditory hallucinations that instruct people to take action are always harmful-Thank you.
He’s just trying2b comprehensive.
If someone were quite even-keeled and not at all disposed to believe in woo, I can see how it could be positive. One of the common sayings in meditation is that you are not the voice in your head. Yet it can certainly feel like you are. Perceiving your inner monologue as an external voice could drive that point home and help pull back and observe your thoughts instead of reflexively inhabiting them.
Do you get hypnagogic dreams? Could you go on about it? What words besides your name?
I’ve also had audio hallucinations when right on the edge of sleep (though never when fully awake). I don’t think that it’s just “failing to recognize my own inner monologue”, because the voices I hear are always of specific people well-known to me (most often, my mother or sister, but occasionally my father, or one of my professors). And what they say is typically the sort of thing one would expect those specific people to say.
I’ve also found that, when it happens, I can sort of “tune in” the voices, to hear them more clearly, and that that “tuning in” helps me to fall asleep quicker.
If the regular hallucinatory voices are like dream voices, perhaps the bad/destructive ones are akin to nightmares? Just a thought; I am by no means claiming this is backed up by fMRI studies or any such thing.
Hm, you don’t seem to be getting an awful lot of serious answers in this thread, so I’ll give you one.
I was in the psych hospital four years ago, suffering from the manic phase of bipolar mania/depression. One time, I was about to leave my room completely naked, and I heard a voice in my head saying, “A lot of people will be very disappointed.” So I put some clothes on first.
When I get them, they’re more like the aural equivalent of afterimages. After I go to a loud party, when I go to bed, I’ll hear voices that I can recognize as specific people that were there, but the words are indistinct. They don’t sound like the people are saying gibberish – it’s more like they sound muffled (but at a reasonable volume).
Czarcasm, you might be interested in reading Julian Jaynes, as mentioned upthread:
I don’t think his ideas are much believed in these days, at least not in their most sweeping form, but it’s a pretty fascinating read. His thesis more or less is that modern “consciousness” is essentially a learned phenomenon, and that until very recently (a few thousand years ago) EVERYONE lived their daily lives being told what to do by benign auditory hallucinations, as if by a god.
Jaynes does include an example of a benign auditory hallucination he experienced–he was alone in his room and I think a graduate student when (he says) he distinctly heard a voice saying “include the knower in the known.” It made no sense to him and so can’t really be classified as helpful, but on the other hand wasn’t harmful either.
(I have the book, but I don’t want to slog through it to replicate the anecdote exactly; but I’m sure I have the gist correct.)
Bicameralism has been pretty thoroughly debunked both by historical evidence and modern neuroscience. It’s an example of how the philosophical approach to psychology results in pseudoscientific gibberish.
Stranger
I think I more or less acknowledged the debunking in my post, but there is this (though it’s also a decade old) which points to potential insights in Jaynes’ work:
https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/
As they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for sweeping bicameralism as laid out by Jaynes is either lacking or runs against it. That doesn’t mean however that all of his thoughts about consciousness or elements of “bicamerality” are wrong, perhaps especially as regards “voices in my head.”
One famous (potential) example is Joan of Arc.
Although your opinion of whether her voices were good or bad would probably depend on whether you were French or British.
I think this article would be of interest. In it, a Stanford anthropologist argues that the nature of the voices are informed by culture. To quote the teaser opening paragraph:
Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests.
Is there truly a clear and sharp line that can be rigorously drawn between ‘voices in the head’ and ‘inner monologue’?
And are voices in the head always the same thing as auditory hallucinations? (I’d have thought the two things are somewhat mutually exclusive - if you have an auditory hallucination, surely your perception is that the voice is outside of your head?)
I’m conscious that some of the responses in this thread have not met your expectations - please understand that I ask the above in complete earnest. if this post represents a hijack that you don’t want to entertain, please just ignore it.
IMO, there is no similarity. Inner monologue is just thinking without saying it outloud (something–BTW–TV characters are incapable of doing.) I’m not sure if all people who have “voices in their head” experience it as if it were an actual external voice, but either way it isn’t consciously created and controled by the person. It is the difference between picking up your cup of coffee and watching in horror as your hand picks up your cup of coffee of its own volition.
My reason for asking was that my own inner voice (which I usually recognise being in control of) sometimes surprises me and suggests ideas I don’t feel like I am the author of (these can be good, bad or neutral). it’s the same voice and I perceive it in the same way - it’s just that sometimes it’s me explicitly driving it, other times, it seems more like I’m following.
Those are very distinct for me. Inner monologue is me thinking. I know where the information is coming from.
“Voices in my head” makes me think they sound like someone speaking audibly. The information feels like it is coming from an outside source.
However, if this board has taught me one thing, it is that other people think really really differently that I do.
Either you are atypical or I am because I’ve never had anything similar to that happen.
I like to say that my subconscious is smarter than I am. Bitch sometimes pops up a solution that I’ve been looking for for ages, but she’s been known to do it at 3am when I was asleep :mad:. I’ve learned to send difficult problems to the back-burner so she can deal with them and hopefully pop up that solution at a decent time. In my case, those solutions are generally visual, but then, a lot of my problem-solving is visual: when I’m trying to come up with a strategy to clean up piles of data, for example, I visualize the files and sources and their connections, and then once I’ve got the whole thing drawn in my mind I basically take what I’ve drawn and Make It So using whatever file-matching tools I have available.
Thing is: I know I’m the source for those images. What moves something from “my subconscious is smart” to “religion” or to “a problem” is how is it perceived. If the images were unhelpful they’d be a problem whether I perceived them to be internally or externally sourced.
I once met someone who had schizofrenia, we got to talking about it and part of the therapy involved realizing that what he was perceiving as external voices was in his head. He still hears them as being outside, but he knows they’re inside. Other parts of the treatment involved learning to figure out which hallucinations were actually useful (hey, only because something came from the voices that doesn’t make it bad) and which needed to be pushed away or even a visit to adjust meds.
Jonathan Blow, a game designer/programmer, has talked about how he’ll sometimes code on autopilot for 20 minutes and, at the end, he’ll have a solution without remembering much of what happened, a lot like people can get in their car to drive home and just seem to get there without really remembering any of what happened. It’s likely also how people can tie their shoelaces or play songs (even improvised ones) without having to consciously think about it. Learning how to steer your own subconscious is like Paul Atreides harnessing the sandworm.
The voices in my head are always telling me to spend money on shopping, grooming, and having a good time, so I guess that could be considered “self-destructive” in a long term economic sense. 
I’m wondering how typical ‘typical’ is. I have heard of people who claim that their thought processes didn’t really have a perceived ‘voice’ element, which seems very weird to me, but normal to them, apparently.
There’s also the whole ‘dark passenger’ thing. It’s the same voice, it’s just surprising what it says,