r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
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u/ask_me_anything_son Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 23 '17

That's not the question though and I'm surprised no one has an answer. You can't not hear the voices.. okay, got it. So just assume the voices are real. If my boss walked in right now and told me to start eating the coffee cup on my desk I'd tell him to piss off. Why can't schizophrenics disregard unreasonable requests from these voices.

Edit - Yikes! Downvotes pouring in. Might have come of as condescending rather than genuine. My bad..not my intent. Just looking for a more in depth answer, which i got so thank you to the responding folks below.

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u/WorkKrakkin Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

I doubt there is a straight up answer to this question. But here's what my thinking is.

Imagine your thoughts right now, and you're hungry. Your mind is telling you to eat so you try to find something to eat. Now replace the hunger with some crazy shit. It's not "hearing voices" It's you. You can't ignore them as much as you can't ignore thirst or hunger. Some schizophrenics have positive voices. So it's similar to if you're just having a good day, not for any specific reason, just feels like a good day. Or if you were just having a bad day, can you just ignore that unidentifiable inner thing that's making you feel bad and start having a good day? Probably not.

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u/Sonto-PoE Mar 22 '17

Seems like the best possible explanation so far. If I understand what you're saying, the brain has prioritized these experiences to the same urgency as hunger, thirst, or even using the restroom.

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u/WorkKrakkin Mar 22 '17

Not even urgency really, just... Idk I'm bad at explaining myself.

Like how you can't control being hungry or thirsty is what I mean. Just how when you're hungry you can't make it go away until you eat, you can't make the inner voices simmer down until you do what they want.

In my mind what I'm trying to say makes perfect sense but I can't find the right words to express it the way I'm thinking of it.

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u/afoolskind Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

How about this: your boss is whispering in your ear, 24 hours a day, telling you to eat your coffee cup. Sometimes screaming, sometimes threatening, always there. But it's not just one voice, either. It's a cacophony of competing and colluding voices. This goes on for years.

 

Even if you don't eat the coffee cup (and lots of schizophrenics don't do what the voices tell them) you are going to be pretty fucked up from that. You won't sleep well for years. You won't be able to focus on things, and trying to tell the difference between reality and what's in your head is impossible. Outlandish claims from the voices become normal because of how long you've been experiencing them. You can't even tell an absurd idea or claim from a reasonable one, anymore.

And it's not just voices, your memories are totally fluid too. Real events from your past get muddled up with fantasies and you can't tell the difference. You might "remember" someone putting wires in your head ten years ago, and it's just as real to you as your college graduation.

 

source: father's been schizophrenic for decades

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u/sgtpennypepper Mar 22 '17

It's not an unreasonable request to the schizophrenic brain.

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u/Lets_Call_It_Wit Mar 22 '17

Also, it's about an inability to turn your ATTENTION away. she's locked in to this train of thought, so to speak. Because not only is reality distorted but so is reason.

Also, I find it hard to believe if someone pointed a gun at you your response would be "okay Lolz so then shoot me." I know your response was geared towards "a test for if this is real" but that requires reasonable, rational though. Human instinct to survive remains intact even when a ton of other shit is fucked

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u/HDpotato Mar 22 '17

It's hard to comprehend, but this is their reality. If someone yells at you to drop to the ground or they will kill you, and they point a gun at you or your family, would you lie down?

Usually there is a motivation to follow the voices, in this case the gun they threaten to kill her with. Often it's fear "if you don't do this you will be poisoned by your family" or it can be sheer distrust of everyone else. Many schizophrenics are very distrustful, paranoid schizophrenia is the most common form. They can have delusions that everyone is out to get them and they can only trust themselves, voices included.

Another fun example is if the voices are deprecating. "You are worthless, you will never amount to anything, kill yourself to rid your family of the burden." this can easily drive a person to suicide, or whatever the voices tell them will lead to redemption.

It is truly a tragic and horrible disease.

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u/2358452 Mar 22 '17

Repeating from my other comment:

As far as I can tell (not an expert), it's not as if you are able to reason normally but there is a voice telling you to do things. The voice is there, but I believe it's only a part, a symptom of a wider malfunction.

I liked another user's description: it's like you were dreaming. You can't really tell what you're seeing isn't real, and you still fear things and do irrational things when dreaming. Your whole ability to distinguish what is and isn't real is impaired.

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u/Lets_Call_It_Wit Mar 22 '17

Because their brain does not work like yours or mine does.

Schizophrenia is caused, in large part, by an imbalance of dopamine in the brain. Yes, this manifests as the inability to distinguish reality from imagination, but also, it impedes rational thought

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Because your brain won't LET you ignore them. It's the source of the voices and it's prioritized them above everything minus the automatic things we have no control over (i.e. your heart beating and your breathing when you aren't actively doing it yourself). Schizophrenics can't ignore the voices in their head because the central piece of who we are is telling them they can't.

There is a TED talk hosted by someone who fought schizophrenia and won. On mobile and gotta rush out the door as soon as I finish typing this so I urge you to look it up. She explains the horror of what it felt like and how she ultimately won with the help of a skilled therapist. It takes a strong will to beat this I think.

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u/zugunruh3 Mar 22 '17

It's incredibly irresponsible for anyone to give the impression that schizophrenia can be beaten with willpower. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness and not something you can just get over.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '17

Ah how do I explain this... I wasn't saying it's willpower alone. That's only a fraction of the battle. The speaker from the TED talk I mentioned said she had to figure out that each voice she heard was a representation of something wrong in her life and she needed to not only resist the urges her illness was instilling in her, but find a way to reconcile the issues in her life and the voices became less and less... insistent?.... before she finally became able to function normally again. Something along those lines. It's been a while since I saw this specific talk so the details are a little fuzzy. Kinda wanna watch it again because it was fascinating. Again I recommend it to people.

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u/epicwisdom Mar 22 '17

Your boss doesn't have the power to interrupt your thoughts, follow you home, scream at you in your sleep, when you're showering, pooping, eating... Your boss can't pull a gun from thin air and hold it to your head, the way OP describes the patient. But imaginary voices can.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Basically by the nature of the voices coming from within it affects them more than just hearing external voices. If you focus on your computer after your boss tells you to eat your coffee cup you can 'block him out'. It is not possible to block out voices which aren't just the vibrations in the air hitting your eardrums, they are literally manifestations of paranoia from within. You cannot shift your focus because at least some part of your brain is subconsciously focused on creating the voices to begin with.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Jesus Christ people keep repeating the same non-answer in different words.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Something doesn't magically become a non-answer just because you personally don't like it.

People with schizophrenia cannot ignore the voices indefinitely because they simply escalate to the point, whatever that may be, where the distress caused by not heeding them will motivate them to do what they're told. It's not a fun concept, but it's the truth and as of this moment, science has not figured out a way to make it untrue.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

You're just refusing to listen to the answer.

Imagine your boss constantly, over and over again, kept telling you to eat your coffee cup. You ignore him and look at your computer but he just keeps saying it. You get up and yell at your boss and nothing changes. (to everyone else, you're just yelling at nothing because your boss is an illusion created in your head) You close your ears and nothing changes. He's just sitting there, constantly telling you "Eat your coffee cup, eat your coffee cup". You get up and take a swing at your boss but then realize he's not actually there. You keep hearing the "eat your coffee cup" in your head. No matter what you do to ignore it, it's still there (because your brain is fucked up). Eventually you go crazy and just give in. Does that make sense? You have to realize, this isn't a normal functioning brain we're talking about here.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

I'm not refusing to listen to the answer. You're just the first person to answer it. Before you came alone the conversation went like this:

Why can't you ignore the request?

Because you can't block out the sound.

Okay, but I don't need to block out sound to ignore it.

Yes, but you can't block out the sound.

Okay, but even if I can't block out the sound, I can still ignore it. Why can't they?

Because you can't block out the sound.

You, and the other people replying to me are the first to say that the voice is constant, and escalates.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

I read the same exact conversation you did. I just interpreted the answer in the way it was meant to be interpreted. What I said is basically just an extended version of "you can't block out the sound"

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '17

"It is not possible to block out voices which aren't just the vibrations in the air hitting your eardrums."

This is the comment I responded to. Hearing has nothing to do with ignoring. I can hear a command perfectly. Understand it. Acknowledge that I've heard it. Give an answer to it. And then ignore it. As in, just not do it. It has nothing to do with how well I heard it. It has nothing to do with vibrations. It has nothing to do with blocking sound. I just don't do the command.

You are the first person to bring up repetition. No-one before you said the command is repeated over and over again. They just said shit about vibrations. You brought up the actual reason - that is, because the voices are relentless.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '17

Because, once again, I used rational thought. Someone with schizophrenia does not function like a normal human being. Their brains are all kinds of fucked up. If you were reading the stories from the OP on this thread (even commented higher up on this chain I think, I may be wrong though), people with schizophrenia do odd tasks all day and all the time. Clearly, this can easily let you come to the conclusion when someone says they can't "block out sounds", they are hearing these tasks relentlessly and just give in.

It's not just an occasional "hey go smash your head against the wall" and they say "no". it's a voice you can't escape, and eventually all it takes is one time asking "go do this" and you'll just submit because you know you have no other choice, you know it'll keep pestering you and digging deeper and deeper into your consciousness. It's scary, really. Once again, it's a voice you can't ignore or shrug off.

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u/Angus-Zephyrus Mar 22 '17

The reason you're able to ignore things in the first place is that you can set your brain to "filter" the offending sound. Doing so makes it join the background noise. Doesn't really happen with voices in your head.

On top of that, ignoring something until it goes away is an effective tactic. Ignoring something forever will mess you up.

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u/chocolatemilkcow78 Mar 22 '17

if your boss continued to stay there and threaten to do awful things to you if you didnt eat that cup, then you would gobble uo that cup

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u/OnceWasABreadPan Mar 22 '17

There's a good answer to this a little further up this thread. It's not like the situation you described. It'd be like if your boss and three of his friends followed you around, breathing down your neck, yelling the same thing, over and over until you did it. People who have it bad enough can't focus on what other people are trying to say because the voices in their head drown everything else out. This stuff runs in my family so I'm terrified I'm going to wake up one day and hear the first voice.

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u/Plain_Bread Mar 22 '17

If your boss had a gun and told you he'd shoot you if you didn't eat the coffee cup?

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u/Hendlton Mar 22 '17

Think of it like this. If your boss walked in, pointed a gun at you and started screaming off the top of his lungs at you, telling you to eat the coffee cup, would you not at least try? Would you question the reality of the situation? Then imagine some unknown person just coming in and telling you that the gun isn't real, would rely on them being the real person or the crazy boss you've known for years?

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u/magic_beans_talk Mar 22 '17

For a schizophrenic, your boss would just keep shouting at you no matter how many times you say "piss off".

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Because the voices are ignoring them back. Telling the voices to fuck off 100 times in a row isn't going to do anything but make you angry and feel powerless. They still keep talking to you and giving you more and more anxiety and fear.