Wednesday, August 30, 2017

"Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says"

Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests.

Via Reddit:  People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research.

In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology and first author of the article in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The experience of hearing voices is complex and varies from person to person, according to Luhrmann. The new research suggests that the voice-hearing experiences are influenced by one’s particular social and cultural environment – and this may have consequences for treatment.

(Link to more)

8 comments:

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Excellent!

edutcher said...

My voices speak Latin every Sunday at 10 AM.

The Dude said...

American voices bad, voices heard in the 3rd world good.

Methadras said...

I'd like to know why people who have out of body experiences never go off-world? Why don't people on the other side of the veil of life only see humans and not anything else? You never read or hear these people recollections that they saw a grey alien or some other alien life form, just their loved ones.

That implies that either the entire thing is a construct of the dying mind, that aliens don't really exist, or that humans are the only beings worthy to enter into heaven/hell.

Amartel said...

What a dopey thing to say. There are worlds of difference between environments within each of these countries. What if you were a hallucinator living in a huge city in India? Versus one living in rural Montana. Proximity to lots of other unhappy, disturbed people (or maybe proximity to a tv eternally tuned to CNN) would seem to be the key environmental determinant.

ampersand said...

Moses, Mohammed and Joan of Arc heard voices proving God thinks pork chops, dogs and the English are unclean.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Meth, do anyone make it to heaven and come back? I thought they make it to the light, but don't actually quite go into it.

Methadras said...

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...
Meth, do anyone make it to heaven and come back? I thought they make it to the light, but don't actually quite go into it.


According to some accounts of NDE's and actual cross-overs, there have been people who claim to have gone to both Heaven and/or Hell and come back to describe it. I asked a woman at a book symposium on NDE's, because the topic fascinates me in strange ways, what the light actually was. This narrow tube of concentrated light and she said that according to her understanding, that is your life-force traveling through your spinal column into your brain as it exits out of your third eye into the next stage, death, which to her is a dimension of light and raw electromagnetic forces uncoalesced, but distinct and heaven is the repository or factory by which this dimension exists.