"Experts have long thought auditory hallucinations arise from a person perceiving their inner thoughts or speech as real voices coming from the outside world. When people without schizophrenia speak or prepare to speak, the brain region that plans movements suppresses signals in the auditory cortex. This helps people distinguish their own speech from external sounds. Researchers have thought this mechanism could apply to healthy people's inner speech as wellthough that has been difficult to study and verify."
"The hard thing with studying inner speech is that it's inherently private, says Thomas Whitford, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia and co-lead author of the study. To eavesdrop on that inner speech, Whitford and his team used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity in people with conditions on the schizophrenia spectrum, including participants who heard voices and those who did not (but may have in the past), and participants who didn't have"
Auditory hallucinations affect up to 80 percent of people with schizophrenia. Self-generated speech normally triggers suppression of auditory-cortex responses via signals from a speech-planning region, helping distinguish inner speech from external sounds. Inner speech produced suppression of the auditory cortex in adults without schizophrenia. In people with schizophrenia-spectrum conditions who experienced auditory hallucinations, inner speech produced increased auditory-cortex responses. Dysfunctional interaction between speech-planning regions and auditory cortex can cause inner thoughts to be perceived as external voices. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings compared people who hear voices, people with related conditions who do not, and healthy controls.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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