I’m trying to figure out what’s happening to me and I’m not sure where to look.
For the last several years, whenever I listen to silence-filling noise (white, brown, pink, etc.) I tend to hear additional sounds. It’s like having your radio tuned to a MHz that’s just off a tiny bit, so you hear static but there’s just a slight edge of voices or something that you can’t quite make out but is definitely there. Sometimes, instead of voices, it’s also patterns in the noise or various pitches.
It happens in a variety of situations, like Youtube videos, audio tracks from meditation apps and noise generators, and even devices that have no audio input or antenna and are specifically for noise as you’d find in the waiting room of a massage clinic. It even happens when it’s a completely benign source like an air fan. And the sounds I hear match the volume of the source.
Do I have superpowers? A brain tumor? Am I just sensitive to imperfect wave form generation? Am I part-dog? Have I done damage to myself from listening to Metallica way too loud for too many years?
Where do I start looking into this? Does anyone have any possible explanations for what I’m experiencing that might lead me in the right direction?
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It is called Auditory Pareidoilia.
Everyone is telling you that you are schizophrenic and it is very sad because they are absolutely wrong.
It is normal and common to hear additional sounds that don’t exist in white noise.
Read about it here:
https://www.tmsoft.com/blog/why-you-may-be-hearing-phantom-sounds/amp/
https://thedebrief.org/auditory-pareidolia-the-voices-in-your-head-may-have-a-rational-explanation/
https://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/apophenia-audio-pareidolia-and-musical-ear-syndrome/
Never forget that we’re doing incredibly complex audio signal processing with meat.
It’s fatty jello that we electrified and tricked into believing in itself!
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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It is a totally normal function of a totally normal brain. What is NOT normal is for it to drastically change in adulthood. That could suggest a change to the part of the brain responsible which should be checked out.
If you read the post carefully you’d see that OP says they have had this for several years. It is in the first sentence of the second paragraph.
Can confirm I have this with White Noise, especially when i combine it with another ambient sound, thought I was going crazy when I started sleeping with an air purifier in my room till i realized what was going on.
Yeah. Still see a doctor, because it’s new, but I’m guessing the doctor will just say “huh, keep an eye on that”.
Schizophrenia can have early warning signs, but going there right away has “it’s always cancer” energy.
If you read the first sentence of OP’s second paragraph, you’ll see that they say they have had this for several years.
Sure. I meant new in the sense of it hasn’t always been this way, it changed in adulthood. I don’t know, I’d mention it to my doc.
See a doctor. Do it now. Not later. Nobody here will give you accurate medical advice. The underlying causes are diverse. You will not receive worthwhile medical advice without a proper diagnosis.
I would add that advising OP is the importance of seeing a doctor is also medical advice, subject to the same caveat about accuracy. A group of people telling them to see a doctor urgently could induce a harmful level of fear or anxiety. Anxiety is not warranted in this case, given that OP described the normal experience of auditory pareidolia to a T.
Don’t listen to this guy, go see a doctor. It’s probably nothing, but only a doctor can help you get diagnosed.
I’m not saying don’t go, just don’t work up much worry about it. (The doctor is going to explain it’s normal, too.)
You should go see a psychiatrist if you can. This definitely sounds like early schizophrenia and a lot of people ignore the early signs before it’s too late. With medications a normal life is possible so don’t worry. But let a psychiatrist make the actual diagnosis
This is not schizophrenia. It is a common occurrence and a type of tinnitus.
https://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/apophenia-audio-pareidolia-and-musical-ear-syndrome/
Yeah this is why a real psychiatrist should diagnose it to make sure, better to see a doc and not lemmy
This was my first thought, too.
Every medical question on social media ever:
American: I have this problem
Response: Have you seen a doctor?
American: No.
Response: Why not?
American: I can’t afford it.
I tried to make an appointment with a PCP in my area yesterday. The next open slot they had was March…of 2025.
It’s impossible to tell if that’s an indictment of the people’s attitude or the “healthcare” system. Probably both. This country sucks rotten ass sometimes.
It’s an indictment of of the health system.
You need to be an idiot to avoid the doctor in a country with socialized healthcare. In a country without, you just need to be cautious.
Hey there. I experience the same thing. The voices, the music, in the white noises around me.
I’m not schizophrenic (or at least I hope not). It is a weird phenomenon that some of us experience that seems to be our brains trying to match important patterns, like speech, out of noise.
Heck, Devin Townsend even wrote a song about it “Voices in the Fan.”
If it’s really bothering you or scaring you then, yeah, you could seek help, but if you’re not experiencing auditory hallucinations outside of this context then my completely unqualified opinion is you’re probably fine.
It’s this:
https://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/apophenia-audio-pareidolia-and-musical-ear-syndrome/
People in this thread think they are psychiatrists.
Thanks for finding this.
Hevy Devy +1
See a GP
If it’s changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.
No, it isn’t normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.
It’s not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it’s your brain that’s doing it.
The question is why it is doing it.
Perhaps it’s just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.
( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I’ve got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of “blur” to those senses, so they mesh oddly )
But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.
( I’m a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one’s life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an “acceptable” drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not “pretend” to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People™ are. )
_ /\ _
This is not something for Lemmy to solve. This is something for a psychiatrist to solve.
It’s a type of tinnitus. Learn about it.
https://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/apophenia-audio-pareidolia-and-musical-ear-syndrome/
Thanks. Still not something for Lemmy to solve.
I disagree. I think humans are supposed to talk to each other, share experiences, and figure things out.
Yes, but we tend to suggest going to a professional when lives or health are at stake. This is why we use engineers to design bridges and not groups of well-meaning laypeople.
Ignore any advice here except “go to a doctor”
See a doctor.
As said by others; see a physician, then a psychiatrist (in that order).
Auditory pseudo-hallucinations may be completely benign, especially if you’ve partaken in psychedelic substances recent or long since past, but they may also be an early warning sign of (like you said) potential pressure on the brain or abnormality in brain functioning.
And even that might be fine.
Either way, why gamble? Go see a doctor.
It’s pretty normal, brains try to meaning or something in its senses. Sometimes if you hear tapping you may start believing it’s the beat to a certain song. There is also of course that viral video that makes you hear “brainstorm” or “green needle” depending on which option you are mentally choosing.
If you expect to hear something you will hear it. There have been funny moments where I removed my earbuds, put them down, and I kept listening to the faintly playing music. I put them back in 30 seconds later and I realized they were muted the whole time
This is normal, I hear it too sometimes. Particularly when I’m laying with one ear covered so I’m hearing white noise while trying to fall asleep. Something about the mix of frequencies, part of them traveling through/bouncing off the walls and the pillow, and just getting older sometimes creates an illusion that a TV is on in the other room or someone is talking outside. Sometimes I’ll think my phone alarm is going off (I use internet radio for the alarm, so I never know specifically how it will sound), but then lift my head and my brain has enough info to determine it’s just noise.
Mild hallucinations are normal. It’s impossible for your brain to gather 100% accurate data, let alone process everything it is handed, so it hallucinates all the time in ways you don’t notice to fill in the gaps (ex. the large blind spot in your vision that your brain has learned to ignore). It’s only if it’s starting to cause you distress or cognitive dissonance that you should seek help. Ex. it’s one thing to hear a TV in the other room that’s not there, it’s another to conclude that your long-deceased grandfather must be watching TV and think that’s normal.
As we get older, our bodies start to wear down. If something starts to fray, it’s generally not a problem unless you completely ignore it until the little problem becomes a big problem.
Don’t get freaked out by some of the words thrown around in these responses. You should probably invest in an annual medical checkup, this is a great thing to ask them.
Seriously, it’s never a bad idea to have a check-in with your doctor, but this is totally normal. Our brains are pattern-matching machines that try to make coherent sense of our sensory input, and do so overzealously. After all, we evolved this way because it’s better for survival to mistakenly hear a lion in the brush than to ignore the sounds of a lion that’s really there. That’s why we see a face in the moon, and Jesus on slices of toast.
It’s also the phenomenon behind those ghost-hunting shows. They put a recording device in an empty building, and our brains pick out “voices” from random static that it records.
It’s called auditory pareidolia, and here’s an article about it.
it’s never a bad idea to have a check-in with your doctor
Assuming medical visits are free and your doctor cannot make mistakes.
I knew a woman who went in for a colonoscopy, and then had a cascade of complications resulting from poor skill and bad decisions. She never left the hospital. She died in there, because the medical staff sucked at their jobs.
Well, if a neurologist orders a colonoscopy, the OP has big problems! Joking aside, sorry about your acquaintance, that stinks. In any case, “never hurts to” is a figure of speech, at least in my part of the world, which roughly implies, “you could do that, but in my estimation, it won’t help.”
