I, like millions of other people, wear a noise machine every night to help me sleep. In my case, I provide several types of noise: white, pink, green, and brown. However, I noticed something strange. After about 30 minutes of noise in my head, I start hearing something. Sometimes the music is like a full orchestral score. Other times, people are talking outside of the range where you can hear the actual words being spoken. Sometimes I hear sounds like my husband playing video games.
So I do what most people do when random noises keep me up in the middle of the night. I’ll try to find it. I turn off the white noise and listen intently. Should I ask her husband to turn down the volume on the TV? Should I text a neighbor to check on her? Is there actually an entire orchestra playing sheet music in the alley below my window?
And of course, that never happens.
The first time I googled this random noise of noises, I panicked. Apparently, hearing things that aren’t there, called auditory pareidolia or auditory hallucinations in the spiritual world, is a hallmark of schizophrenia, and some experts say this requires psychological testing. Masu.
“This phenomenon is more likely to occur in people with mental disorders, so anyone hearing these hallucinations should be evaluated by a mental health professional,” they advise. Ruth Reisman, an audiologist who focuses on rehabilitation using auditory technology. He also noted that research on the subject is divided, with some studies finding that noise causes hallucinations and others not.
But in any case, the therapist I’ve been seeing regularly for nearly a decade should have picked up on my schizophrenic tendencies. I have many things, but schizophrenia is not one of them. But…I hear strange noises with vague sounds.
Fortunately for me and others dealing with this particular condition, there are completely normal reasons why you might hear random sounds in white noise (or other continuous noises). got it.It’s still called that auditory pareidolia, but it’s on the pattern matching end of the spectrum, not the psychotic end. Simply put, your brain is trying to understand what you’re hearing by filling in the gaps between the noise you’re hearing with common sounds.
“When you hear sound, your brain becomes a pattern-matching machine,” he says. Neil BaumanCEO of Hearing Loss Center Help. “Everything I say, every word, every sound, is in your brain, in a database. And every time a sound comes in, your brain goes through the database to see if there are any sounds with the same pattern. , and then it says, “Oh, I recognized that word.” ”
Even if it’s a word you don’t know, such as ancient Greek, you can recognize some letters and some sounds, and your mind fills in the spaces to recreate the patterns it already knows.
Apps and machines that generate color noise such as white, brown, pink, and green are based on algorithms or code. This is not completely random, so you will hear what appears to be random noise for a while, then the sound repeats. On the surface, it probably doesn’t seem like it. However, as the brain recognizes patterns and tries to make sense of them, you end up hearing noise that isn’t really there.
