Musical Hallucinations Gone Wild

Breathing you're not crazy to breathe a sigh of relief there um, Because as as we're going to discuss in this podcast, as we attempt to try some a little new blow your mind in fifteen minutes or less, um, there are these things called musical hallucinations, which is okay, so you're not like having a hallucination about Annie the

musical right, but yeah, you do not. You're not hallucinating that Daddy Warbucks is coming up to you and like giving you a cookie and you're having and you're having to chase dogs in the streets or anything good, because that would be really frightening. Datty Warbock is awesome fun. Yeah,

but but no, it's not a visual hallucination. But it's more like you're say, you're just setting there, you know, in your living room alone or in your hospital bed alone, and you you just keep hearing the sun will come out tomorrow, the sun will come out tomorrow, just over and over again, over and over again, and nobody else can hear the Yeah, and you're like, you know, pulling it nurses and saying, do you hear that? Do you hear the sun will come out tomorrow? When when will

the song end? And then all of a sudden you're injected with something and yeah, and it's not an ear worm. It's not like you know, and you're not schizophrenic either, right right though in schizophrenica they do well, Schizophrenics often experience uh or in some cases experience what's called a pseudo hallucination, a pseudo music hallucination within a hallucination. No, pseudo hallucination is when you you know that it's not coming from the role, like you're not fooled by it.

So it's a situation where you're not saying, whoa who's playing that music? You're like, there's this music and it's not real, and it's you know, it's clearly not coming from some sort of outside force. Okay, so that's just like the background music to hallucinations if you're schizophrenic. But if you're not schizophrenic, it just seems to be coming out of nowhere, right, it seems like it's coming out

of the stereo. Now. It's also important to note that some auditory hallucinations are normal, like especially when you're just as you're waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night. Uh, you you there's a chance you'll hear something that's not real. But if you're hearing it elsewhere in the day, like like I said, just at noon, you haven't been asleep or anything and you're hearing a song, then then that's where you probably need to go to a doctor. And this is a real thing. This is

a real thing. You're not making this up, not a joke podcast. Well, and this is the thing that I think it's troublesome is it's mostly found in the elderly population, right with with hearing loss, yes, which is I mean it's kind of like, all right, you're getting older, you're hard of hearing, and then all of a sudden you have this loop of music that you can't stop. It seems terribly depressing. Yeah. One of the stats I was looking at is one and about ten thousand people over

the age of sixty five experienced these and uh. And again it's commonly elderly people with hearing problems. There's this guy, doctor Victor Disease. Yes, yeah, not to be confused with Comedian of Saint Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Uh. And he studied musical hallucinations in thirty patients and he found that indeed, they generally occur in patients around seventy three years old.

Eight percent women. Um, well, I mean women live longer, so I can't help but think that probably right, Uh, live alone and uh and many of them had hearing impairment, right right. And I actually was looking at the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry and they had a couple of examples of this. Um. They're both women that were in seventy five and eighty um. But the one, the eighty year old nun, she was a retired school teacher and she had actually had a deafness or a level

of deafness for like forty years. But then she happened to hear um ringing and buzzing in her ears, and then she heard a really loud, intense noise that was coming from traffic, or so she reported. And several hours later she became aware of an intense noise in her head and she said it was like a boiler factory. And this was followed by the perception of someone singing jingle bells boiler factory. I think that's a drum and bass grout. I know, I kept thinking, boiler factory. What

does a boiler factory sound like? You know? Um? I mean it just sounds like a cauldron of soup. Was interesting in the study that has ease, did they actually nailed down the most common songs that these these older at The number one was who Let the Dogs Out? And the number two was was an all In Parson's project song And now I'm just kidding, but no, it's like that. One of the big ones was like an old like um religious tune called a Bide with Me. I don't know it, yeah, but apparently it was big

back in the day. So because that's the thing. The they're kind of like earworms in the sense that they are that you're gonna you're gonna have musical hallucinations of songs that you've heard before, songs you've probably liked or you've just heard over and over again throughout your life to the point of nausea, you know, right right, Because there's there's the memory part of the brain, especially in people who have some level of deafness, that are reconstructing

this strong this song right. Um. And we we'll get into a little bit later about why that is, why it's going haywire, so to speak. But I also wanted to mention that epileptic seizure, certain medications, and lyme disease are a few of the factors that might set this off as well. So you don't necessarily have to be elderly with some level of deafness. You could have had some sort of procedure. Um. Actually, this happens to Um.

There was one man who had a heart operation and then he woke up later and began to hear It wasn't like Eva, prone, don't cry for me, Argentina. That was kind of great and awful at the same time. Um. So it's not just you know, you don't have to be deaf to do this. This is this happens. Yeah, and again I'm disease, So check for ticks because otherwise you might wind up having I can't get no satisfaction over and over again into your head until you go

completely mad. Yeah, you don't have to keep thinking about this. Like the generations to come, if this happens to them, will they have like Justin Bieber or like baby you know baby, it'll be that Lady Gaga song will be Yeah, yeah, I won't do it. I think I've pushed it far enough with Justin Bieler. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. So, yeah, you have this happening mainly with the elderly population and with people who

are have had some sort of deafness. Um. But both of the patients that I talked about, that five year old woman who had something similar in which she had old hymns and the eighty year old woman who was the former nun who had jingle bells, both of them could replace these hallucinations willfully with songs, other songs or prose of their own choosing um by concentrating. Oh wow. So they're just kind of like it's like an internal iPod and you just like think hard enough and you

can skip to a different track. Yeah, and one of them could actually slow it down to Oh that sounds kind of nightmaric. I know. Yeah, you know, but but where you think that you're hearing the devils. Yeah, I would always saying, I mean, I would have these night tares or they're kind of like night tares when I was a kid, where it would be Fred Sandford speaking

really slowly. Yes, I'm serious, not making that up. I didn't happen long, but it would like it happened a couple of times, and it was scary because you wake up and it's just like Roman and all that stuff. And I mean, I can't even do it is like slow motion, as if Fred Sandford were speaking through a fan. We're talking about Sanford the Sun here. Yeah, yeah, Red Fox. Yeah, okay, just just for so yeah, slowing down jingle bells sounds horrifying. Yeah, it could be very much. Um, So you know, I

guess the question is why does it happen? Yes, and uh. And researchers believe that that that these hallucinations may actually you know, it comes down to disruptions in the communication pathways between the sensory centers in the neo cortex of the brain and the reticular formation. So it's um. For instance, of pet scans they've done, they found that the patients are of suffering from these musical hallucinations. All right. It lights up the same areas of the brain that are

lit up by listening to music. So the brain is actually stimulating itself to to get the to get this music, to get these sounds going. Uh, and it's retrieving them from the patient's memories. Okay. And this is in the elderly population with levels of deafness. Okay, so they're having the same parts of their brain light up as someone who with normal hearing. Yeah, okay, So I guess the problem is then that the it doesn't activate the primary auditory cortex, which is the first stop for sound in

the brain. So when they're hallucinating, they're only using parts of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music. And so these regions, these music processing regions, may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret, and that's where it gets kind of haywire, right, Yeah, I kind of get the I guess the way I

tend to to sort of interpret it though. It's it's kind of like the brain is like, hey, we really need to listen to Alan Parson's projects I in the Sky song, but we can't. We can't find it and we can't actually hear it. Go into go into the memory, see what you can find. Let's drag that out and let's let's listen to it inside and seeing. I think that's fascinating. And it's trying to match the impulses to the memories of music, right, But it's not all the

hardwares there. Um So, it is that sort of mental malfunction with these random impulses that are generated by the brain. Um so. I mean this would also explain why so many of the sufferers happen to be deaf or hearing impaired because they they're stimuli deprived. Hearing centers of the brain have become so hyper sensitive to these impulses. Yeah, it's kind of nuts. Um did you know about the O C D factor? No, I don't think I ran

across that. It's pretty interesting. It's a study by Dr Haggai Harmesh and he presented a link between musical hallucinations and O C D so UM, because researchers examined people with a bunch of mental disorders bipolar UM, depressive disorder O c D, panic disorder, schizophrenia, social phobia, and so on and so forth, and of those groups, none ranked as high in instances of musical hallucinations as those patients with O c D forty one as compared to in schizophrenics,

which I thought was really interesting because there's this sort of repetitive thought element to it which is a hallmark of O c D. It's like, instead of washing your hands, it's that song. It's that Yeah, you're you're struggling your brain with this song over and over again. UM. So that actually has been really useful for doctors because they begin to use SSR eyes to try to treat it. Um. If it happens to fall on the O c D marker Um, do they think that they might be able

to alleviate it a little bit that way? Um? Because if if you can, you know, ramp down those O c D UM elements of it, then the thought is then maybe you could quiet the repetitive of the song now given sufficient hearing. UM. I understand they've also been able to use the just some like headphones, iPods. Yeah, well that's what I think. That's fascinating. It's like we'll just combat it with another song, you know, So just okay that justin Bieber song is getting your nerves? How

about this one? You know? Um? But yeah, I mean that's that's sort of the sad part of this is that there's really no bulletproof method to get rid of this. People just sort of have to live with it. And uh ZS actually argues and every time I say his name, I'm still picturing his sound. Sorry. But yeah, but as these beliefs that that that that our use are just excessive use of iPods and and walkman's in the modern era, that it's gonna make us even more susceptible to this

as this generation gets older. Yeah, I kind of wonder about before because I mean, you've all we've always been bombarded by um all sorts of auditorious stimuli, right, Yeah, I mean on one level, it's like I do feel like like iPods and Wattmans it allows us to just constantly just bombard our brain with the soundtrack. I mean, I know, I am just I constantly have music going unless I'm you know, actually having to socialize with somebody. Um, I mean, I'm listening to a mix right now in

my other ear. I'm only get you know, I was and see your earbud. Yeah, but but you know, it's it's so on one hand, yeah, I can say, yeah, a lot of people were listening, probably to more music than you could have in recent ages. But I think people were music junkies. Have We've had music junkies for a while. I mean, you can you know, it's not like you could only play a record player for an hour a day and you had to have like a

donkey moving. They have, you know, empowering the turntable. Yeah, yeah, which would be kind of cool or not. I mean if you're a luddite. Yeah, but um, but yeah, I don't think it's necessarily going to increase incidences of this, right, because it does seem to be something that has to do with hearing loss and just getting that part of

the circuitry um sort of tripped up. But to me, it's like, if anything, having more access to music is just another diversion, right, Yeah, And it seems like at the very least you'll you've have there's so much great music out there that we're able to, you know, find in so little time that at least the stuff is gonna be stuck in our heads when we get older. It's gonna be really good. Yeah, hopefully, right. I mean, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I don't know. Is it fifteen minutes?

We're not actually timing this. I don't know. We might have gone over if if we did. Hey, bonus, you didn't even have to pay for that extra that's right, if you didn't. Hey, that's that's another couple of minutes to put on your favorite tune. Hey. Speaking of of of ending it here, though, let's go ahead and jump

onto the listener mail. We had a listener by the name of nerf while or at least that's his I think it's his, uh because hand Yeah, I think he's a programmer, a program director somewhere, so that's his handle. And uh. He says, Hey, Robert Julie, I enjoyed your podcast on swarm psychology and intelligence. Uh. And then he goes on to point out something that that he really

contributes to the conversation. Here. He says, there's a naturalist philosophy called the guy a principle part of the theory is that at a certain point of human population growth, if I recall call it correctly ten billion, the humans of the planet will function together as a single higher organism. The planet thinking is one with humans acting as brain

cells of the unified mind. On the surface, that sounds far fetch, mystical and awesome, but if you look around at the world we live in today, it seems to be the direction we're going in. Things like trending topics on Twitter, RSS feeds, and even outsourced phone banks might make it seem a lot closer to reality than it would have only five years ago, as we pro approached ten billion, Doesn't it seem like this is slowly becoming

a reality? So I think it's a very good question, right, I mean, we've this The population is unprecedented, right, we know it's just going to grow exponentially. So does that change the way that we behave as a species future thought? Yeah?

There you can. So, Hey, if you have any kind of cultivates to share with us about the past podcast, and indeed, if you have any personal experience with musical hallucinations or anything similar, um, God, please tell us, Yes, please tell us, because we would love to and you know, and if you want to remain anonymous on any of these things you send us, just make a note about it, and we're happy to retain your secrets for you. I mean, we'll share your secrets, but we'll just we'll just want

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