People who hear voices in their heads but are not mentally ill may be better at detecting distorted speech sounds than other people are, finds a studying in Brain. Researchers used fMRI to image the brains of 12 non-mentally ill people who experienced auditory hallucinations and 17 controls as the participants listened to acoustically degraded speech that mostly sounded like gibberish at first listen. Three-quarters of the voice-hearers reported hearing the hidden speech sounds, compared with 47 percent of the controls. Voice-hearers also showed stronger brain responses in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and superior frontal gyrus, areas related to attention and perceptual processes.

Susie Bean Gives