2008/01/05
>>Inducing Auditory Hallucinations #1

Background

An at first strange but now understandable change in my brain occurred without me noticing until years later. While in grade school, I was frequently in situations where noise was going on that I didn't want to listen to. It could be my relatives talking, or music on the radio I dislike. Whatever the circumstance, I would find means on my own of playing music in my head such that I wouldn't have to hear whatever background noise I either didn't want to listen to or just plain didn't care about. If I did this long enough, with characteristically distinct music I had listened to plenty of times before, I could induce an auditory hallucination so strong and loud that I would startle myself at the music blaring in my ears. As soon as I became startled, the music I thought I was hearing suddenly would stop. The entire process from first playing music in my head to the auditory hallucination was about five minutes, with the "audible" music playing for about four seconds total before being abruptly cut off.

Environmental Changes

After entering my Senior year in high school, I was in a constant position of listening to whatever real music I wanted to and being around only people I wanted to hear talking. If I were ever in a situation where I didn't want to listen, it was always in a place that required listening anyway, such as work or class. From then on, continuing today, the lack of my being put in a situation where I don't want to listen and have the option of tuning everything out and listening to my mentally produced music diminished to none. Five years went by without a single moment where I would have listened to my own mental radio.

Causes

As a result, the ability fell out of practice, and I find myself no longer able to induce my own auditory hallucinations at will. I found I had even ceased to play mental music for the most part, and any time I did try to, singing had become so attached to breathing that listening to music with vocals in my head resulted in forced breathing timed with the singing, and listening to music without vocals caused me some breathing distress until it rhythmically fell in time with the beat of the song. This most certainly was caused by the great deal of singing by myself to my own played music I had done in the last few years, both in my own cars and at home.

Hypothesis

As a small test, I tried very hard for a few hours a day to induce the hallucinations and break my breathing attachment to the music I would play in my head. The attachment for the most part is broken, but the furthest I got with the hallucination induction was the brief sound of running water right before I fell asleep one night. The neural connection/pathway that enabled me to induce such hallucinations is surely still there in some capacity, and can readily be strengthened and induced once again. The trouble is finding out what situations or circumstances are best to bring about its return. Since the running water incident, I have reflected on all of the auditory hallucination I had done, and realized that most if not all of them resulted in me putting myself into some kind of meditation, or more likely a pre-sleep mode wherein my brain changed its behavior in some manner much like before I fall asleep at night, and the clarity allowed the concentration on the music I was mentally producing to successfully activate my audio cortex (much in the way that thinking about moving one's hands for long enough sometimes inadvertently results in spontaneous movement). Can I truly regain the power of auditory hallucination again, recapturing the neural pathway that once was so strong and so readily accessible? Does the plasticity of the brain extend to voluntary hallucinations, given enough time and concentration?




I am Sawa.

Since your thinking has a direct bearing on your performance, your thinking must be based on sound input.

I listen. I watch. I write.
With no wings, with no things.