Crazy to audibly hear god?

[jimtron]

My Take: If you hear God speak audibly, you (usually) aren’t crazy

There’s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.

Except that usually it’s not.


Hearing a voice when alone, or seeing something no one else can see, is pretty common. At least one in 10 people will say they’ve had such an experience if you ask them bluntly.

It's common, therefore not crazy.

 

[Good Lt]

One in ten is not common.

Nine in ten is common.

Are we to draw from this that 90% of people do not ever hear God's voice? Why don't we ask these 10%ers (individually and isolated from other responses) what the voice sounds like and compare responses?

 

[jj]

And Audio Paradolia is not uncommon, but concluding you actually heard a voice with evidence the contrary IS uncommon. You're WIRED to hear voice in any kind of sound. It's deliberate, it's how we can communicate via speech.

 

[angrysoba]

My Take: If you hear God speak audibly, you (usually) aren’t crazy




It's common, therefore not crazy.

I think a lot of people have auditory hallucinations. Have you never thought someone had suddenly called your name? I'm sure there's pretty solid science on how auditory hallucinations occur and there is absolutely nothing crazy about them. If someone is already religious I could see how they might genuinely believe there was some supernatural thing going on.

One in ten is not common.

Nine in ten is common.

Really? If I said one in ten people in the US have syphilis, you wouldn't think that makes it a common disease?

 

[appalling]

I'd say one in ten could be considered pretty commonplace.

It's common to see a mail carrier.

I've heard (not from an inner voice) that long-term solo sailors and others who experience isolation hear what they think are voices.

I don't think it's always a mental disorder (though it often is). It's sometimes just pareidolia, or seeing faces in clouds, an effect we can know is erroneous but are hard-wired to do.

Voices alone aren't always a disorder. If it was full conversations, I'd suggest getting some help.

Edit: My points were all made as I was typing.

 

[jimtron]

My point in the OP quote is that the article's author appears to be making a logical fallacy: hearing god's voice isn't crazy, because it's common.

 

[Monketi Ghost]

I once had a conversation with a religious friend. He was exploring just what it would take to make me believe in a God. After tossing the idea around, it came down to me requiring proof of some kind; a Burning Bush routine or something equivalent.

"So then, you'd believe."

I said, "No, then I'd assume I'd gone around the bend and check into a clinic."

We concluded there is no proof that would sway me. I don't know how I feel about that.

 

[appalling]

My point in the OP quote is that the article's author appears to be making a logical fallacy: hearing god's voice isn't crazy, because it's common.

I took from it that the argument was that hearing voices does not necessarily mean "schizophrenia", which isn't fallacious at all, it's true.

The article goes on to talk about situations I wouldn't characterize as "hearing voices".

In fact, my research has found that these unusual sensory experiences are more common among those who pray in a way that uses the imagination—for example, when prayer involves talking to God in your mind.

This is interesting, because it means they aren't "hearing voices" in the way we have been discussing it. They are outright allowing themselves to imagine them. It's the way an author hears characters while writing.

It's still not a mental disorder. But it shows that there is an interesting difference between non-voluntary common hallucination and desired and abetted (while not predicted) imagination.

 

[jimtron]

I took from it that the argument was that hearing voices does not necessarily mean "schizophrenia", which isn't fallacious at all, it's true.

The article goes on to talk about situations I wouldn't characterize as "hearing voices".

You're right, as a whole the article does make valid arguments.

 

[appalling]

Having a dialogue with Mark Twain in my head isn't the crazy part, basically.

Convincing myself that he was actually talking to me is the part it gets "crazy", though I don't like that word here, as it always conflates "mental disfunction" with "stupid or bad idea".

I don't think religious people are "crazy", I think they're wrong, I think they're unsupported. I think they've deeply confused a metaphor for various understandable human reasons, sometimes profiting by it, sometimes not.

 

[Loss Leader]

There's a whole lot of difference between "isn't crazy" and "is sane."

 

[TheRedWorm]

I can induce certain auditory hallucinations in myself. I guess the difference is is that I know they are just that.

 

[LaurelHS]

I have experienced something like an auditory version of the Tetris effect. If I've been listening to something for a long time (like a room full of talkative people) during the day, I might hear it again at night when I'm close to falling asleep and the room is quiet. I wouldn't call this crazy either, because I know it's not real.

 

[Jim_MDP]

Hmmm... I hear a voice and have conversations in my head every day. In fact, I'm doing it right now.

It's always me.

 

[fuelair]

Thinking you hear a voice is one thing. Hearing the voice tell you it is god and what to do next is crazy. For more than one reason.

 

[Irony]

To have an occasional auditory hallucination is not crazy. I've heard my name before when no one was around to say it, and other things like that. I just chalked it up to background noise and an overactive pattern-seeking brain.

"Hearing voices" however is not even remotely the same thing. It's like the difference between hallucinating water on the horizon in a desert, and hallucinating a sleuth of bears balancing on beach balls rolling down your street.

 

[eight bits]

The author of the OP article, Tanya Luhrmann, is well known and has done extensive research in cultivated halluncinations. These are not necessarily religious in character. She helped Stanford students experience Leland Stanford, Jr as a a presence in their lives. Although developing the skill to expereince secular but meaningful hallucination was suggested to her by a colleague, the idea is not original with her. She is, however, innovative in studying the phenomenon within a controlled experimental investigative design.

http://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/...t-thinking-about-thought-forms-from-stanford/

In other words, Professor Luhrmann's larger point is that hallucinations are not only common, but having hallucinations is an easily learned skill. A few years ago, as a personal experiment and before I knew anything about her work, I taught myself to have a specific (and I think "safe") closed-eyes visual hallucination. It is the "afterimage" you would see if you looked at a black letter "X" on a brightly lit white field for a minute or so. I mastered the skill inside of an hour. I still do it almost every day.

That I learned it and have maintained the skill is "proof of comcept." It is a skill, however strange that might sound, and so its exercise is not necessarily a clinical symptom. Other people want more ambitious hallucinations than I do, in other sensory modalities, The literature richly attests that they can learn to have those, too, whether self-taught or taught by someone else.

I wasn't interested in anything more ambitious. Just about any skill is subject to dissociative performance, which concerned me. That is, mastered skills will often operate without conscious direction. A familiar example is that so many people can drive "without thinking about it," and yet drive successfully.

Just the other day, for example, I was thinking about a document handling problem, and decided I would place a yellow-fluorescent "X" marking on certain papers. I didn't do anything about it, I just thought about the problem.

I then happened to close my eyes, and there was my now-familiar after-image hallucination, vividly displayed, attesting to the operation of the mechanism which I had developed. I had elicited the image, and its appearance was meaningfully related to my conscious activity, but I hadn't "invoked" it nor "asked for it." It kicked in "on its own."

If I had been interested in something more ambitious, it is reasonably clear that I could have had an autonomously appearing God, or an autonomously appearing Leland Stanford, Jr. Well, OK, if I had been interested in that, then it would be Keira Knightley. But the principle is well established. Halucinations are not necessarily of pathological origin.

If I may add some remarks on other comments,

My point in the OP quote is that the article's author appears to be making a logical fallacy: hearing god's voice isn't crazy, because it's common.

That is not the article author's position, and what Professor Luhrmann says, she can back up with extensive field work and experimental investiagtion, much of it prominently published, peer-reviewed and all of it thoroughly mainstream anthropology and psychology. Perhaps the article did not fully develop her argument, but this can hardly be surprising in a popular and non-scholarly outlet.

The anthropology of mental health practice is, by the way, another of Professor Luhrmann's research areas, in addition to "religious" expression. Therefore, I am confident that she, more than most people, could do without an introductory level exposition of "logical fallacies" as they apply to the problem of defining mental illness, with all due respect. Your later ackowledgment of Professor Luhrmann's cogency is noted with approval.

The article goes on to talk about situations I wouldn't characterize as "hearing voices".

However, what the author means by "hearing voices" combines at least two separable phenomena: a halucinatory experience and the dissociative quality of the experience. The combination is what interests her. So, it is not just that the subject "sees" or "hears" Leland Stanford, Jr, but also "interacts" with him, not as a ventriloquist interacts with a dummy, but rather as one sentient being interacts with a different sentient being.

Convincing myself that he was actually talking to me is the part it gets "crazy", though I don't like that word here, as it always conflates "mental disfunction" with "stupid or bad idea".

That would be a third possible component to this kind of experience, the failure to connect the skill-building phase (the effort to learn to encounter Mark Twain, in your example) with the subsequent productive exercise of the skill.

Luhrmann's research is ethical (and human-subjects regulated!). A religious entrepreneur would not neessarily disclose to "subjects" the potential of learning hallucinatory skills from engaging in well-crafted "devotional" activities. Basically, that would parallel a malefactor secretly putting a hallcinogenic drug in somebody's drink.

In such a case, the victim is not reasonably suspected of mental illness because they fail to figure out what was done to them, and especially not for failing to figure it out while the experence is unfolding.

 

[Bikewer]

My wife used to "hear" her deceased mother calling her name. Auditory hallucination... Random neuron firing.
If you're conducting a conversation... Something more is going on. That "more" is unlikely to be direct communication from a deity.
How would you know? Most devout Christians would be immediately suspicious that it was in fact God's opposite number, trying to lead you into temptation.

 

[appalling]

However, what the author means by "hearing voices" combines at least two separable phenomena: a halucinatory experience and the dissociative quality of the experience. The combination is what interests her. So, it is not just that the subject "sees" or "hears" Leland Stanford, Jr, but also "interacts" with him, not as a ventriloquist interacts with a dummy, but rather as one sentient being interacts with a different sentient being.

That would be a third possible component to this kind of experience, the failure to connect the skill-building phase (the effort to learn to encounter Mark Twain, in your example) with the subsequent productive exercise of the skill.

I quite liked her focus on the creative aspect of her examples.

As I've said, I've read similar accounts with authors developing characters through internal dialogues, actively creating while being genuinely surprised at what their characters "say", all while knowing it is self-generated.

It's an interesting field for the study of consciousness and creativity, these self-generated hallucinations.

 

[eight bits]

As I've said, I've read similar accounts with authors developing characters through internal dialogues, actively creating while being genuinely surprised at what their characters "say", all while knowing it is self-generated.

It's an interesting field for the study of consciousness and creativity, these self-generated hallucinations.

The procedure is recommended to playwrights by Aristotle in his Poetics.

I know at least one author who is very proud of the "autonomous voice" of his fictional characters, supposedly cultivated through dissociative means. He is apparently sincerely and utterly oblivious to how much his "autonomous" characters all sound just like him .

Obviously, I think that what Professor Luhrmann does systematically, and what many before her have done spontaneously, is all fascinating. I also think that understanding these showy aspects of truly ordinary human psychology will support great practical advances in woo eradication.