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What I should do about auditory "hallucinations" (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm trying to figure out what's happening to me and I'm not sure where to look.

For the last several years, whenever I listen to silence-filling noise (white, brown, pink, etc.) I tend to hear additional sounds. It's like having your radio tuned to a MHz that's just off a tiny bit, so you hear static but there's just a slight edge of voices or something that you can't quite make out but is definitely there. Sometimes, instead of voices, it's also patterns in the noise or various pitches.

It happens in a variety of situations, like Youtube videos, audio tracks from meditation apps and noise generators, and even devices that have no audio input or antenna and are specifically for noise as you'd find in the waiting room of a massage clinic. It even happens when it's a completely benign source like an air fan. And the sounds I hear match the volume of the source.

Do I have superpowers? A brain tumor? Am I just sensitive to imperfect wave form generation? Am I part-dog? Have I done damage to myself from listening to Metallica way too loud for too many years?

Where do I start looking into this? Does anyone have any possible explanations for what I'm experiencing that might lead me in the right direction?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Seriously, it's never a bad idea to have a check-in with your doctor, but this is totally normal. Our brains are pattern-matching machines that try to make coherent sense of our sensory input, and do so overzealously. After all, we evolved this way because it's better for survival to mistakenly hear a lion in the brush than to ignore the sounds of a lion that's really there. That's why we see a face in the moon, and Jesus on slices of toast.

It's also the phenomenon behind those ghost-hunting shows. They put a recording device in an empty building, and our brains pick out "voices" from random static that it records.

It's called auditory pareidolia, and here's an article about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

it's never a bad idea to have a check-in with your doctor

Assuming medical visits are free and your doctor cannot make mistakes.

I knew a woman who went in for a colonoscopy, and then had a cascade of complications resulting from poor skill and bad decisions. She never left the hospital. She died in there, because the medical staff sucked at their jobs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Well, if a neurologist orders a colonoscopy, the OP has big problems! Joking aside, sorry about your acquaintance, that stinks. In any case, "never hurts to" is a figure of speech, at least in my part of the world, which roughly implies, "you could do that, but in my estimation, it won't help."