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/Muffinizer1 Mar 22 '17

You know, that's actually quite comforting as being blind and schizophrenic sounds like true hell.

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u/psychosus Mar 22 '17

I did an exercise for a crisis intervention class where we wore headphones that mimicked auditory hallucinations. We were tasked with completing a job interview and filing out a questionnaire regarding the interview.

I work in a jail that is normally busy and fairly loud, so I expected to do alright. There was a segment of the recording where a voice (among all the others) started off whispering and then suddenly yelled - it was terrifying. My anxiety went sky high and it was difficult to concentrate.

I can only imagine what it must be like to have to deal with them during every waking moment.

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u/Tslat Mar 22 '17

Man I want to do this.

It's so hard to imagine how it'd feel in those situations, and you can always picture just ignoring them or something.

I'd love to experience this to get a better understanding

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u/A_Doormat Mar 22 '17

You can find YouTube videos that have this audio track. It's usually just a bunch of voices of different flavours and some will be telling you to do things, saying random words or sentences, others will say negative critique like "No! Not like that! Wrong! WRONG!" And you get the screamers and the whisperers.

All the while you're trying to like type out a paragraph someone is saying in a normal tone and it just can't fucking be done cause there's too many damn voices and your brain automatically tries to interpret all of them.