24/10/2025
Brain activity being monitored and recorded helps us understand some of the most distressing human experiences.
🚨Scientists have confirmed that Schizophrenia’s “voices” are the brain mishearing its own thoughts.
In a breakthrough study, neuroscientists have confirmed a long-suspected theory about schizophrenia: the "voices" many patients hear aren't imaginary external threats, but the brain misinterpreting its own internal thoughts.
Using EEG to track brainwave activity, researchers at the University of New South Wales found that in people with schizophrenia who experience hallucinations, the brain's ability to distinguish self-generated speech from external sound breaks down. Normally, when we speak silently in our heads, the brain dampens activity in the auditory cortex to filter out the expected sound. But in these individuals, that dampening doesn’t occur. Instead, their auditory cortex activates—as if someone else is speaking.
The study involved 142 participants and revealed that when people with auditory hallucinations imagined saying a word while hearing it through headphones, their brains overreacted. This suggests a failure in the brain's prediction system, leading it to misclassify internal dialogue as external speech. This finding not only deepens our understanding of schizophrenia’s root causes but could also pave the way for early diagnostic tools that detect these neural misfires before full psychosis develops. Such early intervention could transform how clinicians approach and treat schizophrenia.
Source: "Corollary Discharge Dysfunction to Inner Speech and its Relationship to Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders." Schizophrenia Bulletin, 21 October 2025.
