Extra people in your head?

April 28, 2007 9:40 PM

What is it like having other people in your head? I'm talking about the experience of hearing voices in your head when you are wide awake that seem to belong to distinct entities that are not you and not people that you know.

Someone I care about has what she calls "entities" that talk to her. Each has a name and personality and they talk to each other as well as to her. Sort of like multiple personalities except that she stays in control of her body. It turns out that she had one who had been with her for years with new ones showing up occasionally. No one else knew until two "bad" ones showed up telling her to do some violent things. Since then, she has been getting some intense medical help but she misses the other "voices". I am curious about what this experience is like. She is reluctant to talk about it so I'm hoping others will share what it is like for them.

posted by metahawk to health & fitness (31 comments total)

This will probably get deleted, but you might want to search Google on "schizophrena experiences".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:53 PM on April 28, 2007

I asked my headshrinker how he can tell when people are faking schizophrenia, and he said that fakers tend to describe the "voices in their heads" as too distinct, too much like a real person talking directly to them. According to him, for a schizophrenic it's more of a cacophony, a noisy group of people whose voices fade in and out like a radio, talking to each other. Most of the time you can't understand what they are saying, but you suspect it is about you, and occasionally a voice will address you directly.

And here: What's It Like Hearing Voices?
posted by Methylviolet at 10:10 PM on April 28, 2007

I just did a presentation on schizophrenia, and YouTube actually had some remarkably interesting videos, many produced by people with schizophrenia.
posted by occhiblu at 10:12 PM on April 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder be two different things, with the "distinct voices in your head" bit being more of an MPD symptom? Or am I misunderstanding something?

I've had that experience - it was a manifestation of my panic disorder and depression (though I was nearly medicated for schizophrenia because of it). It's scary. You don't really know whether it's your gut or your imagination or paranoia or your heart (as in "listen to your heart") or you just overthinking things. There's no way to tell the difference. I can't even "trust my gut" anymore because I can't tell the difference.
posted by divabat at 10:18 PM on April 28, 2007

Hearing voices like that would, I think, fall under the category of hallucination, which would likely be categorized as a psychotic symptom, which would start to put someone in the running for schizophrenia, which is a psychotic disorder. That's the link most of us are following, I think.
posted by occhiblu at 10:22 PM on April 28, 2007

(And the idea that multiple separate invisible entities are talking to you could, depending on your interpretation of that event, very well be considered a delusion, which means the person now has two psychotic symptoms, which starts to lean very heavily toward schizophrenia.)
posted by occhiblu at 10:24 PM on April 28, 2007

That sounds like a friend of mine who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. He "talks" to the "others", except that periodically they take over.

The book "The Myth of Sanity", is a really good book about dissociation, and having more people in your head.
posted by dr. moot at 10:26 PM on April 28, 2007

Wouldn't schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder be two different things?

They are considered separate mental disorders now. (And true multiple personality disorder is thought to be exceedingly rare. Some are skeptical that it exists at all.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:37 PM on April 28, 2007

I've hear voices, and have talked to these voices, since childhood, although I consider myself a perfectly normal, well-adjusted person. From my earliest memory to about puberty, the experience was as if I was Gulliver in Lilliput, talking to an assembled crowd of thousands of invisible, tiny people. They would appear when I was alone. They would ask me questions and I would answer them, and in a way, this process helped me synthesize learning and information. Very often, I would "teach" the invisible little people things, like spelling and math, or explain things to them that I had just learned in school or from my parents. I realize now that what I was doing was really talking to myself (a pattern that repeats today), and going back over my lessons and experiences and reinforcing them for myself.

When I hit my teen years, this changed to the mode I have now. The little people are gone, although I can still remember what it felt like to have them around. The little people have been replaced by three voices in my head. One of these voices is "me," the primary person. The other two voices are also "me," or rather, me as if viewed through a different lens.

The best way I can explain it is this ... and this feels totally weird to write this ... my face is a window that looks out on the world, and the three versions of me are constantly pushing and shoving to grab hold of the window and look out, and from this spot they have a measure of control over what's happening outside (they can talk, walk me around, make decisions, etc). The primary me is most often firmly in control -- he's the most powerful of the three. The other two are better at certain tasks, and can influence and suggest things to the primary me.

It's all very much like having two additional versions of me sitting on either shoulder, whispering in my ear. Sometimes they seem to agree. Sometimes, they're telling "me" that the "other guy" is an idiot and I shouldn't listen to him. Sometimes, when I'm stressed, one of them will grab hold of me and actually use my voice to talk to the primary ("Hey Bell! You need to do X and not Y!"). Sometimes, there's only one around, and I talk to him.

What's really weird is when the three versions of me have a conversation, usually when I'm going over options when I have to make a decision. At this time, it's almost like the real me, the guy you'd meet if you talked to me, is really a fourth me that lives outside of my own head, and he's the one that the three inside my head are talking about.

Although I firmly know this is all happening inside my head, and it's just the way my imagination is wired, these are real voices to me. I can hear them.

I saw the movie Cast Away again on cable the other day. There are scenes on the island when Tom Hanks is talking to Wilson, especially where Hanks' character is planning how to build the raft and take advantage of the seasonal winds ... just imagine that happening inside a person's head without any actual verbalizations. That's what it's like for me.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:46 PM on April 28, 2007 [11 favorites]

I don't hear voices, but I absolutely loved the recent NYT magazine article about hearing voices. Article: Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 11:55 PM on April 28, 2007

Re hearing voices and diagnoses (from above-linked article):

H.V.N.’s insistence that it is not just the psychotic who hear voices does not, in fact, contradict psychiatric orthodoxy. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatry, auditory hallucinations are only a potential symptom of mental illness — they must appear with other symptoms, persist for a specified length of time and impede day-to-day functioning in order to become part of a diagnosable syndrome. In a 2001 debate on whether voices are by definition pathological, Tony David, a neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, noted that a “voice-hearer who is not in any distress, who lives a fruitful and productive life according to commonsense criteria, would never enter the arena in which the possibility of mental illness was up for discussion.” Nor does psychiatry insist that the syndrome in question when a voice-hearer is in distress is invariably schizophrenia. Approximately 20 percent of patients suffering from mania and 10 percent of patients suffering from depression hear voices.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 11:59 PM on April 28, 2007

I have on and off throughout my life heard voices. I can't tell you what it's like to converse with such voices, though, because I've never experienced that. I've only had the experience of "overhearing" a conversation between two or more other speakers, none of whom were addressing me.

In my experience, it sounds very much like real sound, but unlike real sound, the binaural effects are missing. Your brain sorts out which direction sounds come from, based on the way the sound reaches your ears, and your ears probably don't both hear the same pitch precisely the same way. These cues are lacking.

So while the sound of voices is real in the sense that it's definitely engaging the auditory parts of your brain in the same way real sound would, it also sounds like it's coming from everywhere and nowhere, very clear, but very distant.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 1:15 AM on April 29, 2007

I occasionally hear voices. I don't think of myself as being schizophrenic, although I suppose I could be classified as one... to a very mild extent. It usually happens during times I vaguely think of as being "white noise": constant pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof, or absolute silence at 2 am yet with a faint, barely-there background buzz. My theory is that my brain is simply trying to make sense of the "silence", and compensates by coming up with all this other stuff.

What I hear is music. Classical pieces, rock music, the works. It's not my mind replaying music I've heard before - they're all new to me, or at least I think they are. It's like hearing a far-off radio - I can barely make out the lyrics or music. It's also like having a song stuck in my head, and not being sure if it's just my mind or a radio in the distance. When it's just a song in my head, I can "shut off" the radio by not thinking about the song - but when it really is on the radio, or one of those I-hear-music periods, I can't "shut it off".

I'm 21, and I've lived with it for years. It doesn't bother me, and I'm rather pleased during the rare occasions it decides to show itself. I haven't told anyone or sought counsel, because there just doesn't seem to be a need to. I also jokingly tell myself that I could someday make a career out of this, by writing down the music.
posted by Xere at 1:40 AM on April 29, 2007

Cool Papa Bell, that's fascinating. It sounds almost like a grey area between Dissociative Identity Disorder and schizophrenia, but I hesitate to slap those heavily stigmatized labels on you because your voices seem like an asset rather than a liability or "illness." It's like you have your own witch's familiars, or daemons (have you read the His Dark Materials books?)

*ahem* On topic, there's a This American Life story (Act Two of the linked episode) that addresses this and attempts to mimic the experience of hearing voices. The result matches Methylviolet's description - mostly slithery, garbled nonsense. I've never had mental voices myself, so I can't speak to its accuracy, but it's creepy as hell.
posted by granted at 2:11 AM on April 29, 2007

I've never had mental voices myself

I mean, aside from what I described in this thread, which you might find interesting and/or relevant.
posted by granted at 2:13 AM on April 29, 2007

I, too, have heard voices off and on throughout my life. If you've ever watched Lost, it sounds like when someone is out in the forest and they hear all this gibberish around them, only without any kind of sense of direction from where it is coming from, sorta like someone is simultaneously whispering in both ears. Sometimes I hear a clear male voice saying something unrelated to where I am or what I'm doing, and again, it's like someone speaking in both ears.

I haven't tried talking to them, because I'm not sure I want to go down that road.

One of these voices is "me," the primary person. The other two voices are also "me," or rather, me as if viewed through a different lens.

Is this not normal? I'm like that too, although they're four distinct people that I don't identify as myself in there, and I always assumed that everyone was like that. I had a real problem as a teenager when they would argue about where to go and how to get there and I would just stay rooted in one place until they came to consensus, sometimes hours later.
posted by cmonkey at 2:15 AM on April 29, 2007

There's a really good novel about people Multiple Personality Disorder called Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff.
posted by carmen at 6:47 AM on April 29, 2007

sounds almost like a grey area between Dissociative Identity Disorder and schizophrenia

I think -- as evident from the experiences of some of the posters here (and more in the links above) -- that hearing voices is just that -- hearing voices. Without a problem or distress, it's just a condition or trait (and much more common than is generally thought). To put it another way, an official DSM diagnosis is not given based solely on hearing voices. There are additional conditions for each diagnosis.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 6:56 AM on April 29, 2007

I had an experience much like Cool Papa Bell's normality once (experiencing my mind as more akin to a committee than an individual) after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms. Being given an insight into my own inner workings in this way was totally cool. Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness explained" is a good starting point for further reading for those interested in this kind of thing.

I also have something very like Xere's internal radio station. Like Xere, it's not something l'm the least bit interested in having "treated"; I like having the spirit of Jimi Hendrix turning up occasionally for a jam session in my own private studio.

The trouble with writing down the music is that the resulting cover versions are never going to be as good :-)
posted by flabdablet at 6:56 AM on April 29, 2007

Cool Papa Bell's experience isn't a disorder. It's something that some normal healthy people do, although it's rather unusual.

I read a paper recently that suggested up to 20% of people will have an auditory vocal hallucination during their lifetime, which was a surprisingly high number to me. Apparently it happens to folks from time to time outside the setting of mental illness and, possibly because of stigma, such folks are supposed to be reluctant to talk about it.

When I was severely stressed out and sleep deprived during my residency, I would hear the sound of my pager going off in white noise, like fans or trucks driving by. I thought I was cracking up and kept waiting for the voices, but they never appeared.

I still kind of wonder what they would say if I were ever to hear them?
posted by ikkyu2 at 7:07 AM on April 29, 2007

Wouldn't schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder be two different things?

They are considered separate mental disorders now.

They always were separate. The confusion comes from the origin of the word schizophrenia which means "split mind" and, is meant to indicate a split from reality not, a split in personality.
posted by squeak at 8:33 AM on April 29, 2007

Xere, Flabdablet: what you're describing could also be tinnitus. (Not to say that it's not hearing, uh, not-voices, just that nothing you've said is distinct from certain forms of tinnitus.)

Ikkyu2: which also raises the question, what is a disorder? I have a friend with DID who has managed to become (through lots of hard work) a "normal healthy person", but still has - or at least perceives - multiple identities. When we don't have an etiology to point to, and sometimes even when we do, classifying non-standard behavior and experiences as a disorder is fairly subjective.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 8:41 AM on April 29, 2007

If it's tinnitus, it's the first tinnitus I've ever heard of that comes with rewind and fast-forward buttons.
posted by flabdablet at 8:51 AM on April 29, 2007

You can experience a form of paranoid schizophrenia in the online, virtual world of Second Life. One of the exhibits created in this space is the Virtual Hallucinations building made by Dr Peter Yellowlees, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. From the exhibit notecard:

This clinic building is based on the hallucinations of two specific people with schizophrenia. They were interviewed in detail and gave feedback on early designs for the hallucinations. While the hallucinations are not glamorous, they fairly accurately reproduce these patients' experiences. You should get a sense of just how intrusive the voices of schizophrenia really are.

As part of the experience, you wear a badge that interacts with the 3D space. As you walk through the building, otherwise innocuous motivational posters subtle change their meaning. Voices start speaking stereophonically, telling you to kill yourself ("You're dead. Dead. Do it. Do it now. Go one. Do it. I know what you are thinking. I can hear your thoughts. I'll steal them. I'll steal your mind. You are dead. Death is the answer."). In some parts of the clinic, the floor drops away. It is all quite disturbing.

Even though it was all virtual, it was an unpleasurable experience, and not one I would like to repeat. However, it did give me a glimpse into the daily extremes of a paranoid schizophrenic and made me feel a little more compassion for the people who cannot simply take off the badge and head out the exit.


Here are a couple of article with more erudite explanations of the exhibit:

A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2004/09/a_lever_to_move.html

What it's like to have schizophrenia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6453241.stm
posted by squink at 9:21 AM on April 29, 2007 [2 favorites]

Cool Papa Bell, that was one of the best posts I've ever read. Are you a professional writer? You should be!

I have a question: how is the experience of listening to your voices different from listening to a real person? Does it feel like the voices are "in your head"?

I don't hear voices, but like pretty much everyone, I can recall or imagine conversations, and when I do so, there's something akin to listening that goes on (I imagine I'm listening). But it's also different from listening. It's a bit hard to describe how it's different, but I'll make an attempt.

Imaginary voices, for me, are muted. When I'm listening to a real person, it sounds as if their words are going directly from their mouths into my head. As if there's no barrier between the sounds and my ears. But voices in my head are like voices coming from under water. Or it's like I'm visiting a prison, listening to a prisoner on the other side of a glass partition.

When I listen to a real person, I always visualize them. Generally, this is because I can see them. But even if I close my eyes, I am aware of what they look like. When I listen to head voices, I don't necessarily see imagines that go along with them. It's like listening to a newscast on the radio. I may have a fleeting image of the newscaster, but I don't continually think about what he looks like.

Real talk is geographical. It comes from somewhere. I'm aware that I'm listening to someone standing over by the coffee table or two feet away from me, on my right. The voices in my head are much less "in space." I may have a feeling that one is coming from the right or left, but it's vague at best.

Voices in my head are like voices stripped of all "unnecessary" features. They are good at conveying ideas and, sometimes, emotions (angry, joyful, etc.), but they don't convey much else (physical appearance, locale, etc.)
posted by grumblebee at 10:19 AM on April 29, 2007

This will probably get deleted...

This is a good example of a seemingly chat-filter-like post that yields detailed, specific answers. "What's a good sci-fi novel about robots?" is much more likely to be true chat filter (though much less likely to be deleted).
posted by grumblebee at 10:22 AM on April 29, 2007

Third for hearing the music occasionally. Beautiful music, the best I've ever heard.
posted by atchafalaya at 10:42 AM on April 29, 2007

"It turns out that she had one who had been with her for years with new ones showing up occasionally. No one else knew until two "bad" ones showed up telling her to do some violent things. Since then, she has been getting some intense medical help but she misses the other "voices"."

This follows at least one pattern of schizophrenia, which is where it starts out nice. It"s called the 'prodrome.' The voices are fun, encouraging, teach you things. The world is suffused with levels of meaning. Life becomes mystical and a wonderful adventure that you hadn't clued into before, and people who don't get it are to be pitied. They simply don't have the insight you have gained.

Then it all goes sour. The voices become mean, disparaging, violent, cruel. The world becomes dangerous, full of tangible and intangible entities who intend you harm.

That's the classic presentation and sequence. Sometimes kids have some schizophrenic symptoms like these but don't develop psychosis until their late teens or early twenties. Sometimes psychosis builds up over a couple of years. Sometimes people just crack. But typically, there is an idyll at the beginning that never comes back.

Your friend may miss the nice voices and be hesitant to accept treatment for the mean onces because she wants to keep the nice ones. But if she is following a schizophrenic pattern, it's unlikely the nice ones will ever come back. They're probably just gone.
posted by kika at 12:15 PM on April 29, 2007

Um, the above was to describe a pattern of schizophrenia. I do *not* mean to imply that everyone who hears voices will develop schizophrenia eventually. I do *not* mean to say that the person you care about has schizophrenia. Just to state the existence of prodromes.
posted by kika at 12:19 PM on April 29, 2007

I seem to be having one of my 'can't shut up' days. Ironic?

To the question at hand about what it's like to hear voices, I once read some very straightforward advice on coping with hallucinations that got a circulation on the internet a few years back that appears to have sunk without a trace.

It had bits in it like "If it moves when you kick it, it's probably real. (Use caution when trying this with people and animals.)" "If a you hear a voice but don"t see anyone talking, it's probably a delusion. (Caution: avoid airports.)"*

My brother enjoyed his prodrome immensely by the way; he said it was like going to university, he learned so much. He knows his voices aren't audible to other people. He'll giggle at a joke made by someone none of the rest of us can see or hear, but waves us off with an "it's nothing" when asked. When he stays up at night arguing and fighting and barking at invisible enemies, he calls this "talking to myself" and appears to interpret his experience this way. (This is congruent with his discomfort with mirrors: he's not really sure that his image is a reflection and not another person.)

My understanding of aural hallucinations is that some people have a strong sense of self and the voices are clearly separate from their 'selves.' Other people (particularly people with schizophrenia) have a vague or piecemeal or nonexistent sense of self, of where they leave off and the rest of the world begins. These people may behave as though their voices are real, external entities, but at the same time appear to understand them as extensions of themselves. So while I think there may be patterns to the experience of voices, for the person you care about I think the best you will be able to do is to ask her, and to accept what she says at face value even if it doesn't make sense to you.

------
*If anyone can find this for me I would be extremely grateful.
posted by kika at 2:18 PM on April 29, 2007

Cool Papa Bell, that was one of the best posts I've ever read.

Thanks.

I have a question: how is the experience of listening to your voices different from listening to a real person?

Real people are always real people and my voices aren't "real." There's absolutely no confusion for me, upstairs, that the other versions of "me" are just figments inside my head. I'm not Gaius Baltar, unsure of whether Six is really "there" or not. ;-)

Does it feel like the voices are "in your head"?

Yep. Like I said, it's like they're coming from spaces just to the right and left and slightly behind my peripheral vision, as if they're trying to crane their little necks in and see outside the "window" of my face. They don't have a shape or form to me, but I intuitively know they're "me," if that makes sense.

I have huge respect for ikkyu2, so it pleases me to no end to hear him say I'm normal. ;-)
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:39 PM on April 29, 2007