Voices of Spirit, Voices of Madness

They are strange experiences—a voice whispered on the wind, a god who speaks from on high—but far more common than we think. At the beginning of most great religions lies a voice. Who hears such voices? I have spoken to hundreds of people, in many countries, who have heard voices, some only once, some more often. Most of these people are not psychiatrically ill. Some are. I discuss what we know about the difference between mad voices and sane voices, and what non-mad people can learn to experience some of their own thoughts as not their own, and not inside them. I discuss evidence that the way we think about voices changes our experience of them—and may soften the impact of psychosis. Most fundamentally, I argue that voices teach us something about consciousness: about how we humans feel our thoughts, about our contradictory intuitions about our own thoughts, and how these contradictions—and the way they are elaborated or ignored by local culture—lie at the heart of hearing voices.