Yahoo News A good ear for speech could be sign of mental health issues
Having unusually good hearing could be a sign of mental health problems, new research has found. People able to make out conversation across a noisy bar or untangle a garbled sounding sentence are more likely to hear hallucinatory voices in their head, according to scientists at University College London and Durham University.
Experiments found that those with a history of hearing imaginary voices had a three in four chance of discerning a meaningful sentence in computer-distorted sounds, compared to less than half a chance among those without a history.
The brains of people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds
Dr Ben Alderson-Day, Durham University
MRI scans confirmed that the region of the brain responsible for monitoring and attention responded better in “voice-hearers”.
Up to 15 per cent of the population hear voices when no one is speaking, although only a fraction of these suffer to a clinically problematic extent, many with linked diagnoses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The research team believe their discovery of an association between auditory verbal hallucinations and better hearing for real-world language will one day lead to treatments for some mental health problems.
Published in the journal Brain, the study involved 17 participants with a history of voice hearing and 17 without.
They were played distorted speech known as sine waves, “alien-like” noises which can normally be understood only if a hearer is told to listen out for certain words.
Without even being told the purpose of the exercise, the voice-hearers picked out the sentence 75 per cent of the time, compared to 47 per cent of the non-voice hearers.
They also detected the sentence quicker than the non-voice hearers who were able to make it out.
The MRI scans showed that the voice-hearers brains automatically responded to the sine waves containing language, but not the meaningless waves.
Professor Sophie Scott from the UCL Speech Communication Lab added: "This is a really exciting demonstration of the ways that unusual experiences with voices can be linked to, and may have their basis in, everyday perceptual processes."
The Research was led by Durham University Hearing the Voice project, a unit devoted to building an understanding of auditory verbal hallucinations.
Dr Ben Alderson-Day, a research fellow on the project, said the study “suggests that the brains of people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds, and shows how unusual experiences might be influenced by people's individual perceptual and cognitive processes."
The study also involved researchers from University of Porto in Portugal, University of Westminster and University of Oxford.
