The Atlantic reports on Tanya Luhrmann‘s recent research, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry “That suggests that the way people pay attention to their voices alters what they hear their voices say.”
More from the article:
” . . . The way schizophrenia sufferers experience those voices depends on their cultural context. Surprisingly, schizophrenic people from certain other countries don’t hear the same vicious, dark voices that Holt and other Americans do. Some of them, in fact, think their hallucinations are good—and sometimes even magical.
“Doctors “sometimes treat the voices heard by people with psychosis as if they are the uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease which should be ignored,” Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann says. ‘Our work found that people with serious psychotic disorders in different cultures have different voice-hearing experiences. That suggests that the way people pay attention to their voices alters what they hear their voices say.'”
