theshopliftingseagull
56985
1418
18
source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232271307_A_difficult_case_Diagnosis_made_by_hallucinatory_voices
Feb 25, 2025 11:30 AM
theshopliftingseagull
56985
1418
18
source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232271307_A_difficult_case_Diagnosis_made_by_hallucinatory_voices
LittleAzie
Not saying that the voices were telepathy or something 'mystical' but there are unexplained intuitions that people do have that seems to help in unforeseen ways. My own story with something like that is a gut feeling I should wait five minutes to make the daily deposit when I was working at a c-store. If I had left when I normally do, I would of been crushed by a piece of heavy construction equipment that had fallen from a trailer. There was no way I could of heard of or seen the trailer either
adamantiumbaculum
This is fascinating. So what you're saying is... I should do what the voices tell me?
ME2BNS12
I like how the last explanation was basically "you are the universe experiencing itself"
KMakyra
First group person here. I also have DID and stress induced psychosis, so....
NotACanadian
Researchgate is a tool for accessing open-access journal articles s or drafts/accessible versions of papers that would otherwise be behind a paywall. It does this regardless of the actual quality of the journal.
Which, by the way, this whole thing does NOT, repeat NOT, read like a scientific paper.
cachilero
I call BS. Neurosurgeons would never use inches when describing a tumor, especially in England.
BipedalHumanoidWithSlightlyDifferentNoseRidge
I'm with the last group. Interesting, thank you.
tetsuothecat
At first my ADHD was like, no way you're reading this. Go to the comments, someone summarized this. Then I was told read the first sentence, got hooked and read the whole thing because it was more interesting than working. Baby steps folks.
Piccolini
I was about to post this - Can we please return to using paragraphs, instead of block text? I started to read it, wanted to read it, but my adhd brain just couldn't go through it :( Yes I'm old (well, 40, but too old for this shit)
I'll save it for later. Maybe now is not the time...
CedricDur
Yeah, BS stories like this is how we ended up with BS religion btw.
Ryyyyyyyan
I don't think she was lying, but I do think her recollection and telling of the events is not entirely accurate and reliable.
Urgalicity
Avatar Therapy is the practice of having constructive conversations with your hallucinations. It has been shown to be quite effective. This is a clear example.
Urgalicity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK373172/
Bigemedic
I lost a job once because the voices in my head were so loud they disturbed my co-workers.
TylerDurden85
My immediate thought reading the headline was exactly the 3rd opinion. Full disclosure I'm a 3rd year US med school drop out so I have more clinical knowledge than I probably should lol. Side note: There are certain brain tumors also associated with hyper-religiosity. I had met one such patient during an oncology rotation. She was so happy that she was "touched by Jesus", wasn't at all phased by the fact that she had a malignant brain tumor. Brains are weird.
TheLovelessHummingbird
This sounds like a very special type of third man syndrome. The brain just goes "you need help so I'm taking over for a bit to guide you to survival, yeah you're welcome"
Unknownhost7
Thats a cool read! Thanks for sharing :)
Vaguely related...
My aunt would hear this super faint 'chittering' noise. Eventually got it checked out and teeny tiny spider had crawled into her ear(likely while sleeping) and made itself a home.
Fishkeeper
Spiders don't chitter, and one wouldn't stay in an ear very long. No food in there.
Mikeiller
https://imgur.com/XnmuI9X
VexedPopuli
What if the voices were actually caused by the tumor? The brain protecting itself?
TheHuntedSnark
A riveting read. The voices told me to give you an accolade.
cowscowscows
Coming down from having psychosis, I only had one dream with all the sedating drugs, but it tried to convert me to islam...
wadatahmydamie
Reminds me of a joke that’s set up very much like this (and usually about as long), except the voice ends up telling the person to sell all their possessions, go to a casino, and put it all on 37.
When the ball lands on 12, the voice just says “mother fucker.”
Snooj
Man, fuck those voices. My son read this a long time ago and was convinced he had a brain tumor because "voices" told him the same thing.
InconspicuousLampshade
Oof, yeah, this was an extremely unlikely event and the fact there haven't been other random spirits helping people is pretty telling. If the idea gets into the mind of a hypochondriac, suddenly every intrusive thought has weight! Scary. Sorry you had that trouble!
MrWobblyHead
Interesting read but I wish the text has been structured better. A single continuous paragraph doesn't make for easy reading, especially if you want to re-read part of it for clarity.
I will often pass up on reading something when it's written like this, because it could quite easily be full of other grammatical errors.
When people write an entire paragraph without a single full stop (period) that annoys the crap out of me too. It takes little to no effort to add them.
TheHuntedSnark
It is an abstract. Yeah, formatted badly, but that's how it is presented in Research Gate.
PriestofThor
That is a wild ride. Fascinating to say the least
xanthio
I just.. I'm confused. Why among every theory, every reaction, every response both in the article and here, why is "brain tumor causes hallucinations" not the first thought? It's *a brain tumor*. No symptoms? What? BRAIN. TUMOR. Hallucinations would be a completely plausible symptom. Their subconscious manifesting the correct answer through their hallucination would be novel.. cool.. but not that implausible or hard to figure out.
MichelGoussu
The voices in my head tell me : "you're a fraud, you won't make it."
Since I read the article they add : " We helped AB because she was worthy, but you waste your time reading memes on Imgur, and stop blaming this on your father who used to beat you with jumper cables"
Hibbtygibitty
The jumper cable guy had children? Holy shit.
MichelGoussu
PepperRidge farm remembers. Memberberrie. Thank you !
JustAnotherRabidToaster
I hear your voices too, but they are muffled a bit and you mis-heard what they said. What they ACTUALLY said was "you are NOT a fraud and you WILL make it." subtle, but distinct difference.
MichelGoussu
ding as I made a lot of therapy work and for a few years, my inner voice is far less judgemental. I even struggle to realize how happy I am now. In a lovely relationship and landed a dream job in the last two years, at 48 years old, it's incredible !
JustAnotherRabidToaster
It's funny how our brains, which control everything about us, will also tell us lies about our self-worth and value. Congrats to you for overcoming the lying and finding love!
beneaththewillowtree
brain pls go
TranscendentMonkeyNutsRupturingAndReIeasingAVelociraptor
This works better as an Unreliable Narrative - you could reveal the notes are all from the woman’s perspective while outside of her hallucinations she’s being well taken care of and consuming information from her hospital in a way that doesn’t scare her more.
IakobZ
My voices just tell me "Kill them all" over and over and over again. Frankly, it's very monotonous.
kgirl924
I'm sorry you're dealing with that. I hope through therapy and medication if needed you are able to overcome your issues.
flopydisk
This is how telepathy works, probably some extra terrestrial being made contact with her.
cousteau
Shocking how nobody considered ghosts.
ArkoneAxon
Remember that there's no such thing as the supernatural - only natural things that we don't yet know about. So... could she have been hearing real voices? Maybe. Maybe not. Just remember that you're reading this after I typed it up on a thinking machine exponentially more powerful than the ones used to send men to the MOON sixty years ago. Transmitted to you via tiny manmade moons. Creating a vast dreamworld with no physical substances, yet somehow incredibly real.
nothingunused
And this case will be used by people to justify the invention of chiropractic "medicine".
91valkerion
While interesting, the boring truth is that at best, this is a case of an extreme coincidence, a statistical outlier. That her clearly schizophrenic episode somehow interpreted the presence of this tumour as something "wrong" and her brain in one way or another interpreted it as a "warning". It's bad enough that so many people believe in angels and demons, let alone people having little supernatural voices inside their heads warning them of tumours.
No, I'm no fun at parties.
Fishkeeper
Schizophrenia is a specific thing that doesn't apply to all forms of psychosis. Sometimes people are just regular psychotic. Like when they have certain brain tumors.
(or haven't slept enough, or have a fever, or a thousand other little things that all stack into "you're gonna maybe go missing now".)
91valkerion
Correct, I will not pretend to be an expert and I may be using too generalized terms and ways to describe the phenomenon involved here. My underlying point is merely that "mysteries" like these ultimately are explainable, or a mere extreme statistical outlier, which is why we even hear about AB in the first place. The human brain is amazing, but I am a bit knee-jerk:y against any implications that she experienced anything "unexplainable".
Fishkeeper
"Schizophrenia" is too specific, is the trouble. If someone is disconnected from reality (i.e. hearing voices that don't exist), that's called "psychosis". Most of us will experience some tiny bit of it at some point. I semi-regularly hallucinate a single spider crawling across things if I get way too tired, and it takes me a minute or two to examine the mental image closely enough to determine "okay, that was just a spider-shaped bundle of black, that wasn't real". That's psychosis!
Fishkeeper
(just, y'know, very little of it, in the way that "if I don't wear my reading glasses I get a headache from reading too long" is a disability.)
Schizophrenia is a specific type of psychosis. It can be mimicked by a brain tumor, but that's not actual schizophrenia. It's also, interestingly enough, experienced very differently by people in different countries- one study found that schizophrenic people outside the US were overwhelmingly more likely to describe their hallucinated voices as
Fishkeeper
neutral, even positive, than schizophrenic people in the US. Many of them reported that the voices they heard were friendly, often giving them helpful advice. As opposed to what people in the US are more likely to (but won't always) experience, with unfriendly if not outright hostile hallucinations.
ShineyBaconLitter
don't you have a magnetic part of your brain, too.
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Mikeiller
https://imgur.com/3QWzTIV
Alurkerforcedtologin
Birds do. It's called magnetoreception It's inconclusive if humans have that or not.
ShineyBaconLitter
yeah yeah, I'm pretty sure that part inside my head where I see full color images, can speak in my own voice, recall memories... I'm pretty sure that is all being done on a magnetic field inside my brain. pretty sure that's how it works mhm https://youtu.be/HZzhE-NcpOk?si=1FCDUcnaOaCQbw-I
Fishkeeper
That's "magnetic" as in "able to detect the Earth's magnetic field and use it to navigate". Birds can, humans haven't been proven to but certainly could in theory.
Also, your brain is made up of swooshy chemicals and electrical signals anyway. It's not absurd in concept that part of it could be made up of magnetic signals, if that was what was up for debate.
ShineyBaconLitter
oh, sorry. my mistake. humans do not posses the ability to detect the Earths magnetic field. one of our brain glands in the very distant past may have but no, you're right. my mistake.
LylaLexie
While the fantastical part of me wants to believe the voices were real and helping her out, the logical part of me thinks the third option most likely. Our brains are constantly taking in information, consciously or subconsciously, and we famously have very strong “gut feelings” or “instincts” that turn out to be correct frequently. She may have heard, felt, seen, or sensed something that didn't register consciously, but was translated by the subconscious into voices that laid out the info in>
super3dcow
I guess the only reason I find the 3rd option less likely is that the voices many times provided information she did not have. Such as the 3 facts, and the address of the hospital and what to request there. In a pre-internet world, it seems impossible to have all of that information just with intuition.
WhatSayYouCitizen
*she claimed the voices gave her information, and she claimed she did not have the information beforehand
Bigblackdick69
When I was 16 years-old I wrote about a woman in her later 20's, finding out then surviving brain cancer. And that's exactly what happened to me so I am comforted by this story.
NacLac
This can be observed by children who are information sponges. They say things later that you have no memory of talking to them about. Or things they were too young to process at the time.
My 5 year old talked about our dog many months after the dog was put down in a way that made me rethink how much she is aware of the world despite her young age and not speaking overly broad about it
Rhythmaster
I had an experience when I was younger, just constantly seeing the number "222" everywhere. Wake up, clock is 2:22. Sale on junk food in store window 2.22. This happened for about a year, it was like the number 222 was EVERYWHERE. The reason? Because it is, its everywhere, just like other numbers are also everywhere but my mind fixated on this one, and therefore, I was much more likely to consciously notice it compared to all the other numbers displayed in my daily environment.
rusrsdude
"Try not to think of a pink elephant". It's literally just that. That's why the path to recovery for most people is to replace the thing they're addicted to instead of just trying to avoid it entirely (cold turkey). This is because doing something (replace pld habit) is better than doing nothing (not occupying your time), and putting your mind in a positive way will help you see things positively even if you do relapse.
Whiterosett
Hey it is good to see a fellow 222er out in the wild. I still experience this and I have ended up giving my gf the same issue by telling her about it and now she points even more 222s out to me.
LoudBirb
We are ignoring what is quite possibly the simplest answer: She straight up fucking lied for the sake of some fame.
She happened to get her diagnosis while abroad, then took the opportunity when she came back to start talking about hallucinations and voices. Really get the mystery up and make herself the heroine of a supernatural story.
I've seen otherwise rational people go to more effort for the sake of being the center of attention of their friends/family.
Anysource
Is "funny feeling in her head" a scientific/medic term?
Fishkeeper
There's probably a term for it.
Fluffy314
I have had multiple experiences in my life that I can easily represent as supernatural, but are all just as easily explained by me either subconsciously noticing details that my consciousness missed or confirmation bias.
The fact that many people do try to represent that phenomenon as supernatural and yet not a single one can replicate the effect under controlled conditions reinforces my way of thinking.
Semphir
I mean....yeah.. Like deja vu... I used to dream stuff and then have it happen in real life all the time as a kid... Like how we where painting in class, and then i was gonna pour out my water and it splashed on my crush... You remember the dream then.. And try to alter it and so on...
Always wished it was some secret power though...
LylaLexie
LylaLexie
Ababybunny
I was just having this conversation about my late stage schizophrenia, with a real person! That is a necessary clarification
spookyu
I would argue that given all your suppositions are true, does that still make the hallucinations any less 'real' in an objective sense? I'd throw out two concepts that in tandem might provide a bit of support to that argument: 1) many people have an actual inner monologue in that they hear many of their thoughts within themselves and 2) intrusive thoughts are a product of a neurochemical and structural malignancy of sorts, are unwanted and sometimes from a seemingly 'outside' perspective
spookyu
Hearing an intrusive thought, even when readily recognized as such, can even be indicative of general distress [within the brain] for an individual who is aware of these processes, they may even seek out treatment to alleviate that distress - anything between unconscious or conscious self-soothing/care and purposefully scheduling a therapy session.
BurtMaklinFBI
Similarly, humans, like most animals, have evolved to be especially sensitive to potential threats, your brain can notice subconsciously when eyes are trained on you, even out of the corner of your eye where you don't register it consciously, giving you that feeling like you're being watched
BurtMaklinFBI
Or followed, for example
Feralkyn
Yeee, I have a sort of secondary... consciousness, I guess? I think of it like a backup system but it can kick in and provide info like this when I am physically fucked. As an example I've passed out with high fever from food poisoning and woken up completely incoherent but with that "voice" instructing me as to exactly what to do. My *conscious* self could not make heads or tails of what was going on but the subconscious remains very aware.
Feralkyn
People think they understand how consciousness works until learning a real simple commonplace fact like "if you're unconscious, sound won't wake you up; if you're asleep, sound will wake you up." There's a lot of leeway in our level of awareness at any given time.
PectorialMuscles
I'm not sure how that comparison really has any weight. It's as simple as knowing that being unconscious is not a regularly scheduled or biologically facilitated process. In fact, being knocked unconscious can be lethal due to how disruptive it is, not just how physically traumatizing it can be. Anesthesia practice requires a doctorate for this among other reasons. Very similar to how some BSODs or BIOS issues result in corruption or malfunction due to improper storage/execution of OS components