What do you think of a person who claims to hear voices? Or sees something that is not? As a rule, such individuals can be classified into two categories: either a schizophrenic or a psychic … How do they differ from each other? Recently, researchers at Yale University Albert Powers and Philip Corlett have become interested in this issue.
With and without diagnosis …
According to the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, studies have shown that 25 percent of the world's population regularly experience auditory hallucinations or something similar, and more than 40 percent have heard "otherworldly" voices at least once in their lives …
Patients with mental disorders often report hearing voices "right in their heads." Sometimes they seem to belong to people (sometimes even to friends of patients), sometimes they are identified as the voices of aliens or some otherworldly creatures.
There are also those who call themselves contactees. They try to convey to those around them information that is supposedly communicated by God, aliens or the deceased … Many such people also have psychiatric diagnoses.
But there are also quite normal people who receive information from the "subtle" world. Not a single survey, most likely, would have recognized the same Wanga, who claimed to be talking to the dead, insane …
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There is control
Scientists from Yale decided to check if there are still any differences between the hallucinations of mentally ill people and those who are considered mentally healthy … They managed to gather a group of volunteers, which included people who called themselves psychics. All of them were selected according to one criterion: they claimed that they received daily audio messages from their interlocutors from the "subtle world" … All selected participants were tested, which showed that none of them was lying or suffering from a psychiatric disorder.
Then the testimony of psychics was compared with the testimony obtained from people suffering from schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis, as well as mentally healthy members of the control group.
It turned out that psychics more often perceive "voices" in a positive way and believe that they help them in life. On the other hand, mentally ill people are afraid of voices (or their intended carriers) and believe that these entities are going to harm them. A typical example: a psychic's voices tell some reliable information about a person or event, suggest how best to act in a given situation … For a schizophrenic, an “inner voice” can “recommend” to harm himself or even kill himself, attack someone another, scares, mocks …
In addition, a sick person usually cannot "turn off" the hallucination at will. But a healthy individual with extrasensory abilities is quite capable of controlling his "voices" and turning them to his advantage.
"These people have a high degree of control over their own inner voices," says Corlett, one of the study's authors. - They are also much more willing to come into contact with them and see them as positive or neutral forces in their lives. We believe that people with similar psychological characteristics can provide us with new knowledge in neurobiology, cognitive psychology and, as a result, in the treatment of such a symptom."
Crazy or "hypersensitive"?
Meanwhile, parapsychologists are in no hurry to refer various kinds of "voices" and other hallucinations that torment people with mental disorders to the realm of nonexistent. They put forward the hypothesis that some astral entities are really present next to us, but in the normal state we are not able to come into contact with them … If a failure occurs in the human psyche, as a result of illness, traumatic brain injury, or, say, delirium tremens, then he begins to perceive the "subtle world", and, as a rule, in its darkest hypostasis. As for psychics, it is not for nothing that this word means "supersensitive." Apparently, there are people who have a higher sensitivity than others, they can enter an altered state of consciousness and perceive "otherworldly" realities,but at the same time they are able to filter their perception and weed out destructive entities …
Or such "hallucinations" may be simply a property of the psyche. That is, the psychic does not talk with an extraneous entity, but with himself, connecting to the information field of the Universe. But information comes to him in the form of phantoms or voices. Let us recall the well-known holy fools and blessed ones who really often said sensible things, predicted the future, but since their psyche was disturbed, information came to them often in a chaotic form … If all this had an exclusively pathological nature, it is unlikely that information received in this way from clairvoyants, would be in any way reliable …