Cognitive Science Colloquium - Tanya Luhrmann / Voices
Cognitive Science Colloquium - Tanya Luhrmann / Voices
March 13, the Cognitive Science Colloquium has Tanya Luhrmann from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford, presenting some of her research on psychosis, hearing voices, and its interpretation in traditions of mysticism. This talk, abstracted below, focuses on the differences between the experience and understanding of auditory hallucinations in the general population, versus in psychosis.
Voices (auditory hallucinations) are experiences in which someone has a thought that they feel is not their own. This work draws on data from extensive fieldwork and from hundreds of interviews conducted across multiple countries to examine the prevalence and variability of these experiences. I will discuss what we know about the difference between the voices found in psychosis and in the general population, and the evidence that three factors (porosity, absorption and training) facilitate voices in the general population. Most fundamentally, I will argue that voices teach us something about consciousness more generally: that we have contradictory intuitions about our own thoughts which are elaborated or ignored by local culture, and that these intuitions facilitate this felt disavowal of thought.