#Auditory hypnagogic hallucinations software#

Thus, in a very important way, listening to music involves pattern matching and recall.īy matching incoming sounds to known musical patterns, the brain cuts down on having to process every piece of information, every single time. And the next time the brain receives these same signals, you will recall the music perhaps you might even recognize that sound as a specific musical piece as soon as you hear the first few notes. The brain will lay down a small memory of the tune and any associated emotions then, the more the tune is heard, the stronger becomes the memory of the pitch, timber, and tempo that make up the musical piece. The violin string becomes a sound wave of a specific frequency, this reaches the ear making little bones vibrate which make the eardrum vibrate, which make little hair cells in the ear vibrate, sending an electrical signal along the auditory (hearing) nerve to the brain, which processes the signals, considering the signals in the context of what was heard before, whether they are pleasurable, and finally determines whether it is music. So, anything that disrupts any part of the input pathways or the interpretation systems can lead to changes in perception and even hallucinations. Of course, every experience of the world - from the most mundane touch of the computer mouse to the sound of the most beautiful piece of music - starts as fairly ordinary signals that are then subjected to very complex processing.

#Auditory hypnagogic hallucinations software#

Think of your experience of the world as being more like Microsoft Windows rather than the software code running in the background we are only privy to the interpretation and not to the raw data. In fact, if we could somehow perceive the world without interpretation, then hallucinations probably could not exist. One of the major tasks performed by our brains is to use the information received from our sensory organs to create for us an experience of our world. Hallucinations are possible because our brains are not mere conveyors, but rather interpreters of information. To the person having the experience, the real and the hallucinated appear to be one and the same thing. I am convinced that the sound comes from some source outside of me and that it is not simply imagined. So by extension, during a musical hallucination I hear a song that no one else hears. And yet, to me, the quotation by the ominous bird of yore seems just as real during the hallucination as when it is verifiably produced by an individual Corvus covax and heard by everyone around me. Conversely, a hallucination is something that only one of us experiences in a real and tangible way - I see a dagger before me but you do not, then while pondering weak and weary I hear a raven quoth “nevermore”, but you do not hear the raven. You and I sense this event and we can both verify that it exists in the real world - you see a red rose and I see a red rose, you hear Blur and I hear Blur. Put simply, awareness is the sensory perception of an event that you and I can both see/hear/etc. As I will explain, you are quite correct in thinking that hallucinations are, in a sense, associated with greater brain activity.įor our purposes, it is useful to think of awareness and hallucination as overlapping rather than distinct phenomena. In fact, at the core of hallucinations lies a breakdown in how signals from the outside world are translated into experience.

This transitional period is also associated with decreased perception of bodily sensations.

Hypnagogic hallucinations, on the other hand, describe any hallucination that occurs during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. This condition is rare and usually accompanies hearing loss. People with musical hallucinosis report hearing complex musical sounds in the absence of an objectively verifiable sound source. The two conditions in question are musical hallucinosis and hypnagogic hallucinations. As such, these conditions provide us with a framework for understanding how we can perceive music that isn’t really there. Luckily, the musical experiences that you describe actually sound like they might be related to two recognized and relatively well-studied conditions. Despite vast advances in neuroscience knowledge within the last century or so, we are still far from understanding these complex processes. A complete answer would require us to understand and explore consciousness, how we sense the world around us, and even how we discern the real from the unreal. Why can we hear music that isn’t really there? This question gnaws at some fairly complex and incompletely understood neuroscience phenomena.