Auditory hallucination
hearing sounds without finding external stimuli, but having the characteristic of actually hearing sounds
An auditory hallucination, or paracusia, is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus. While experiencing an auditory hallucination, the affected person hears a sound or sounds that did not come from the natural environment.
A common form of auditory hallucination involves hearing one or more voices without a speaker present, known as an auditory verbal hallucination. This may be associated with psychotic disorders, most notably schizophrenia, and this phenomenon is often used to diagnose these conditions. However, individuals without any mental disorders may hear voices, including those under the influence of mind-altering substances, such as cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, and PCP due to cannabis-induced psychotic disorder or stimulant psychosis, respectively.
There are three main categories into which the hearing of talking voices often fall: a person hearing a voice speak one's thoughts, a person hearing one or more voices arguing, or a person hearing a voice narrating their own actions. These three categories do not account for all types of auditory hallucinations.
Hallucinations of music also occur. In these, people more often hear snippets of songs that they know, or the music they hear may be original. They may occur in mentally sound people and with no known cause.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Auditory hallucination” is hearing sounds without finding external stimuli, but having the characteristic of actually hearing sounds. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Auditory, hallucination and hearing, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Auditory hallucination” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.