Auditory Hallucinations Simulation

I hope technology will help us to simulate others’ experiences. This is especially needed in psychiatry. I often found myself lacking appropriate words to describe what I felt. My previous psychiatrist misdiagnosed me with schizophrenia. There is currently no lab test to verify whether someone does have schizophrenia, my diagnosis was based on a verbal consultation. I don’t know what people with schizophrenia experience so I can’t know whether my experiences were actually similar or not. Did we all feel this extreme fear in the same way or was ‘fear’ just a common word that we used but our experiences were actually different? I’m sure many people out there, like me, dream of a machine that would allow us to project our feelings onto someone else. We don’t have such an invention at the moment, but the first step is through the use of audio and video. I discovered an interesting representation of auditory hallucinations on YouTube, link below. I know that it doesn’t convey the emotions that a person could be experiencing along with the hallucinations, but it is a start in explaining how schizophrenia/psychosis can affect a person.

Auditory hallucinations – representation

It’s better to listen to this audio in headphones in order to get a better simulation of the surrounding sound. Put on your headphones and try to go through the whole length of the audio. It’s quite unpleasant. It’s nice to know that any second you can pause the video. With real psychosis unfortunately you don’t know when it’s going to end. Psychosis also is usually not just hearing voices that aren’t there, it’s thoughts and emotions – panic, fear, distrust. How can someone know that they are having a psychotic episode versus rational thoughts that are unpleasant? The line is not clear. Recently I had an episode at work during which I kind of heard my boyfriend’s voice inside my head saying that what I did was a ‘low level job’, ‘it was pointless’, that he wouldn’t do such a job, that I was wasting my life. Was that a psychotic episode caused by my immune system acting up or does everyone experience such moments? I would say it was closer to psychosis as it was similar to the audio representation – the voice was not part of my thoughts, it was inside my head, but I could not control it. This seems similar to what people with schizophrenia describe about auditory hallucinations, but then many people without schizophrenia also complain about inside negative ‘voices’. Perhaps by ‘inside voice’ in general people really mean thoughts, and these are more under their control, unlike the hallucinations.

Below is another video of schizophrenia simulation. As one comment states, “This is KINDA accurate but you can’t really recreate the feeling of panic and doubt and paranoia. During an episode you’re possessed by so many emotions that a video just can’t convey.”

Schizophrenia Simulation

What I experienced in the most acute stages of encephalitis also could not be portrayed well with just audio or video. What I experienced was primal fear. Imagine maybe being in an airplane, a long trans-Atlantic flight. You are going 900 kilometers per hour, ten thousand meters above the ocean. Suddenly there is severe turbulence. You’ve experienced turbulence before, but not of this magnitude. You hope it will cease soon, because the pilots know what they are doing, right? But it doesn’t, there is another fall through the air, you can feel it. Perhaps before the turbulence started you were reading a book, do you think you will be able to continue? Or you were talking to the person you are flying with about housing prices, will you be able to hold the conversation, or will you be overwhelmed with the primal fear? The fear that we experience when we are suddenly reminded of our mortality with an added rush of adrenaline. And not just our mortality, but also the mortality of people who for us make our world. That’s what acute encephalitis episodes were like for me. It was like constantly being in that passenger plane above the ocean in severe turbulence. And if that goes on for long enough, when the fear is constantly present, you may then actually start to wish for the situation to resolve in any way, as long as it resolves quickly. I mean that you may wish for the plane to just fall quickly, you no longer believe in safe arrival, but you just want to already escape the fear and the anticipation of pain.